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MacBreak Weekly 964: I'm Just Disappointed
02:18:14
Apple Intelligence, iOS 19, iPhone 17 Air
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell are here. Jon Gruber is sad. He's mad, and he's no longer a believer. We'll find out. We'll find out why. We'll also talk about the new iPhone, air and debunk one common myth or rumor about it, and then it's time to do some headbanging Metallica on Vision Pro. All that coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Weekly. Episode 964, recorded Tuesday, March 18, 2025. I'm just disappointed. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news. And Apple is feeling really bad today because they were spanked. They've been spanked. Andy Inaco is here. Hello, Andrew.
- [01:04]
Andy Ihnatko
Hey there. Hi there. Ho there. Yeah, it's. There's very few times that I say, gee, I'm glad that I'm not in a high position of authority at Apple with the commensurate pay and respect. This is one of those weeks where I'm very happy to just be a.
- [01:16]
Leo Laporte
Commentator, just to come, just a lowly.
- [01:19]
Andy Ihnatko
Comment, just to be able to judge.
- [01:20]
Leo Laporte
That Snell is also here from 6colors.com. Hello, Jason.
- [01:25]
Jason Snell
Hey, Leo. You know, I'm not mad.
- [01:27]
Leo Laporte
I'm not mad either.
- [01:29]
Jason Snell
I'm just disappointed.
- [01:31]
Leo Laporte
Yes, that's right. I'm just disappointed. The worst thing a father could say. I'm just disappointed in you. I expected better. And Alex, Lindsay from officehours Global. Hello, Alex.
- [01:43]
Alex Lindsay
Hello. Good to be here.
- [01:44]
Leo Laporte
Hello, hello, hello. So you know who's disappointed? Jon Gruber. It's hysterical to watch because, I mean, maybe it's because he expected so much more of Apple than I did.
- [01:58]
Andy Ihnatko
Well, also, can I also throw in that he also added in like the clap, the thing that makes it hurt twice as much when your dad says, I just blame myself because I guess I just screwed up and expected so much. He actually said in like paragraph, I.
- [02:13]
Jason Snell
Trusted you too much.
- [02:14]
Andy Ihnatko
I can't believe that I didn't see this. This is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. Like, not to not pointing out that they'd never actually shown this thing working. And that's like, oh, this is why we love you, Joe.
- [02:27]
Leo Laporte
We should probably, for those who are not like us, obsessively following the Apple ups and downs. It's all about Apple intelligence, which if you've been listening to this show, I think you probably knew Long ago was, you know, struggling, not great, having a hard time. Eventually Apple told. Gave a, gave a statement to John Gruber's daring fireball, saying, yeah, we're, we're. We're probably not going to have Apple intelligence until next year, which is 2026 in Apple or later this year or whatever they said. Anyway, 2026. So then John apparently went, went back, wrote the story and then thought about it, stewed if you will, and put out a piece.
- [03:22]
Jason Snell
Yeah, he stewed on my podcast. I caught him mid. He was on Upgrade last week and I caught him mid moment where he was working through his feelings and he used the word bamboozled at one point and I was like, oh, oh, he's feeling it hard here. A lot of feelings going on.
- [03:39]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Basically, he kind of implied that Apple something's rotten in the state of Cupertino. He said, which is not a good, not a felicitous headline, I'm just gonna say for a number of reasons, mainly cuz Cupertino's a city, not a state. But anyway, okay, he said I should have had my head examined. How I missed this. Ultimately, he says Apple lied to us and Apple. Oh my God. This was. I couldn't. When I'm reading this, I'm going, what the hell? See, this is what comes of thinking of Apple as something other than a company.
- [04:22]
Jason Snell
A corporation.
- [04:23]
Leo Laporte
A corporation.
- [04:24]
Jason Snell
Corporation, yeah.
- [04:25]
Leo Laporte
This is what comes of thinking Apple is your lover. It isn't your lover. It is a company. It is dedicated to profit. Let me find the paragraph. He goes on and on and on. My deeply misguided mental framework for Apple intelligence. It gets worse. Apple had its. Anyway, he basically says Apple has fallen off its pedestal. Apple used to be the greatest, most wonderful company in the world, but now, now they're just so, so damaged. I'm sorry, I'm scrolling through this whole thing. I should have probably.
- [05:08]
Andy Ihnatko
He got a lot of feelings out.
- [05:09]
Leo Laporte
He got his feelings.
- [05:10]
Andy Ihnatko
It's a good read.
- [05:11]
Leo Laporte
So has is. The ride is over. He ends.
- [05:20]
Andy Ihnatko
Yep.
- [05:21]
Leo Laporte
When mediocrity, excuses and BS take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of these things and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three. A plague on your house. Apple. No, he didn't say that part. Yeah, but he was really, really hurt that Apple would have lied. You know, is it fair to say they lied about Apple intelligence? I think really what he kind of implied, and I think most people have said is, Mark, we even said this last week. Marketing got a little ahead of what the engineering team could do.
- [05:59]
Andy Ihnatko
I think that this is definitely a fight. This is where we finally get open warfare, so to speak, between engineering and marketing at Apple. This was, I think most of us noticed that when Apple announced all of these Apple Intelligence features, we didn't see even a scripted recorded demo. We saw a mock up video of what this would look like if it were actually working. I don't think that they necessarily lied. They did marketing and I know that's a, that's often a great, There's a big gulf, there's a hard to tell the difference between those two. But some people, I don't think, I don't think John was included, but I think some people were free to think that, oh wow, this is a, of course it's a lab demo, it's not ready to ship yet, but this is what it's going to do. Other people were able to see that this is just again an illustration of, here's an IOU for what we hope to do. Compare and contrast with what Google has always done with Gemini, which is they will give you a really lame, highly controlled demo, but it will be like a live demo. So you can say that, wow, this doesn't look like very much right now, but at least they showed something that was actually working. I think my interpretation of reading Guru's post was that his, he was, he really felt upset about this because he felt as though marketing overstepped itself and suggested that Apple Intelligence was farther along, further along than it actually was, where they didn't have anything working whatsoever, that under those circumstances it was extremely sketchy for them to show a mock up of this thing actually working.
- [07:40]
Leo Laporte
He writes. It's easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something that only Apple could do. But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn't do and now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI, but they don't even know what they can ship or when their headline features from nine months ago not only haven't shipped, but still haven't even been demonstrated. Which I for one now presume means they can't be demonstrated. This is italicized because they don't work.
- [08:14]
Jason Snell
I mean, it is. I don't know. I think part of this is that he obviously brought a little more credulity to the demos last year than most of us did. I mean, I think it's very clear that Apple felt incredible pressure to show that they were in the AI game. We've talked about it before, during and after, and I think it was very clear that they were pushing it hard and potentially lowering their, lowering their standards. Right. There were some things that were very clearly going to be very hard for them to pull off. Clearly not going to happen until 2025. Right. Even at the time, they made no claims that those things were going to happen soon. And so, I mean, John's not wrong in saying that they felt pressure, they lowered their standards. And I don't know if I would say that they lied. Andy is right. It is marketing. And I think also there's probably a cultural disconnect, a cultural problem where somewhere someone said, well, we could probably do this. And in normal circumstances the executives in question would be like, that's probably is not good enough. Let's just boot it to next year. And they were not going to boot AI features to next year. They really wanted them out, they really couldn't. And so they lowered their standards. Now, I think that's one issue which is they clearly someone somewhere misjudged whether they could ship this stuff in the, you know, in the, in the, in the Apple OS year that we're in right now, the iOS 18 year. So that was a mistake, the secondary mistake. And I think that this is actually a better reason for, for John to get mad and for all of us to be grumpy is the marketing. And I go back to my thing that I've been saying for a while now about Apple's. Apple seems to only have one playbook. So they sort of have the way that when you're winning, why change anything? And clearly the marketing department was handed these features as if they were done and said, great, we'll make a commercial with Bella Ramsey where we talk about all these things that aren't going to ship maybe ever, and we'll just advertise it as if it's real happening today. And I think that was a, a huge disconnect and a major problem because the whole Apple Intelligence campaign started before Apple Intelligence shipped any feature.
- [10:23]
Leo Laporte
Like to point out that I've been saying this. I remember watching the NFL and watching these ads saying Apple's pushing these features. Features that don't exist.
- [10:32]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:33]
Leo Laporte
I mean, this was, I think, obvious now, I guess because it's Jon Gruber, the entire chattering class is going crazy over this. Ben Thompson, you know, skeeted right on. And Owen Alec has says he writes, you have to read the whole thing. Gruber is a longtime follower of Apple, close to its high priests and kings. He has a historical understanding of Apple like no other. When he criticizes Apple, you know, the situation is much worse.
- [11:03]
Jason Snell
I mean, is it wrong to say for our younger viewers, maybe they won't remember this, but it's the, if we've lost Cronkite, we've lost the American pit.
- [11:12]
Leo Laporte
It's like that, isn't it?
- [11:13]
Jason Snell
Kind of moment in Vietnam where it's like, Walter Cronkite came back from Vietnam and he's like, people, this is really bad. And that's when the people in the government were like, oh, like if Uncle Walter and middle America is now questioning the war in Vietnam, things are bad. I was like, if Jon Gruber is, is thoroughly disgusted with something that Apple's been doing, that's a bad sign.
- [11:35]
Alex Lindsay
I think it's, I think, I think that, that Apple has, and we've talked about this on the show quite a few times. I think they have a no problem, which is they're not using it often enough. And I think that that's been.
- [11:45]
Leo Laporte
We see that Steve Jobs was brought to the table. Right, right.
- [11:49]
Alex Lindsay
He just, he just. We get, you know, you see this kind of creep of the number of products that are out at one time. The, this confusing process with the chip sets, the, the, the constant changing of the OS in a way that not necessarily is always forward and oftentimes if it is forward, it's too far forward, too fast. A lot of things just not being stable and they're just not there. So aggressively trying to keep up with someone that is imaginary for them. Like, you know, I don't know who they're trying to keep up with. It's not like Apple users are going to jump ship next week, you know, and so, so I think that, and again, I think that their belief that they needed Apple intelligence there was much stronger than the actual need and whatever. Whether they needed it or not, it's a lot worse to have this happen. I think that I applaud John for, you know, slapping them on the wrist. I think a lot of us have been talking about Apple moving too fast down the path of, you know, their ideas rather than really making sure that it makes impact.
- [12:46]
Leo Laporte
The question really is, John, also comes from believing that Apple was something different and special, which I've not believed, I've never believed, and so I wasn't. I'm less surprised. I mean, Google, Google did the same thing with Google. I mean, but I would not unusual.
- [13:02]
Alex Lindsay
Apple, you know, I would Say that Apple does tend to move a lot slower and with a lot more intentionality than most of the other companies out there. I mean they really, I mean a lot of the other companies, yeah, but.
- [13:15]
Leo Laporte
They'Re a company I can plenty of failures on Apple's part. What I can't think of, and I think Grouper's right is I can't get with the give time that Apple marketing has said they had a feature that they didn't have but that very few companies will do that. That's a fumble. Yeah, I'm just not hurt by it. Like that's just. Well, and he screwed up Marcus that.
- [13:40]
Jason Snell
He'S invested some of his own personal, you know, worth in, in his calibration of, of being able to read and write what Apple says and trust what they say and what's the level where you can trust them. And he's not wrong in saying, you know, they lowered the bar. They did not used to over promise at this level, to promise vaporware at this level. And I think that's the thing that bugs him the most is that Apple has always prided itself a company that when you see something, when they announce something, it's either going to ship or it's very close. They have a high degree of confidence. They don't do the fear, uncertainty and doubt. Here's some vaporware, we'll get to it eventually. It's a CES product that may or may not exist, stuff like that. They've never played that game. And he's not wrong in saying that this Apple intelligence announcement is a new low in terms of Apple not, you know, announcing things that don't exist like that. Bottom line is, is that here we are in March, nine months after WW and that product, you know, those things aren't in beta, nobody's seen them and they may never ship.
- [14:41]
Alex Lindsay
And it feels like again, for me, who I mean, I use AI all day, every day. It's really important to me and I just don't care when Apple gets around to it because I'm plenty full. So I have this whole thing like I don't understand why it had to happen. And it feels like just a very unforced error in the same way that the mag charging that they announced that never came to like who cares? Who cares? Who cares about that product? And so they, they got excited in both cases they got excited and had to tell us something that didn't exist when no one was really waiting for it. Like, I just don't. I mean I get the Analysts are really waiting for it. But I don't think that the average Apple user was like, oh, my gosh, when is Apple intelligence coming?
- [15:20]
Leo Laporte
So, you know, maybe that's why I'm.
- [15:22]
Alex Lindsay
Talking about the average app.
- [15:24]
Leo Laporte
When it comes to AI, though, they're not alone in this. I mean, Google released a video of Gemini that I fell for. I thought, wow, this is amazing. And it turned out it was fabricated. You know, I mean, companies have done this for years. I guess if you thought Apple was somehow special. But I've never, I've always thought Apple's a company like any other company and they're going to make mistakes like this. I don't think it's the end of the world. I think you're right, Alex, when you say that's not why people buy iPhones. I don't think the market is. The Apple customers are going to say, oh, I'm not buying any more Apple products.
- [16:01]
Alex Lindsay
They.
- [16:01]
Leo Laporte
They lied.
- [16:02]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, like, what I really, what I hope this leads to is Apple lets us just say, hey, for Siri, I would like you to activate ChatGPT all the time. I'm going to say I'm going to give you the approval for it to be just used. And let me just use that, because that's what I do right now is I have to fumble around to get chat, gtp, chat, GPT to open up. And then I just start hitting the button. I sit there and talk to it about what I'm trying to figure out while I'm working and, and it is seamless, but I have to just get to that first bit. And I can't just say, hey, Shlomo, ask a question. And I just want to be able to. As a user, I'm hoping this failure and the delay means that Apple will stop trying to protect us from ourselves and just let us have the AI that we're already using all the time.
- [16:46]
Jason Snell
I almost, I mean, here we will never know for sure. But my theory is that this decision was made not because, and this is one of the reasons it's sort of a sin. It was made not because of consumer demand. I think, I think the consumer demand for AI is overstated. And also, as Alex points out, a lot of that demand is fulfilled by just using the apps and doing it that way. I think this was about Apple feeling executives feeling like the. In the pressure cooker of, like the. Or, sorry, the echo chamber really of Silicon Valley that everybody's talking about AI and maybe investors are worried about it and they're worried about their stock price and they're worried about recruiting people or retaining people because of the perception. Hiring is another reason you do stuff like this. But I don't think the Apple's thing that they usually focus on, which is consumer demand and fulfilling the needs of consumers, was a motivator here. And that is part of the problem is that they tried to do a spin on it. A lot of these features, when you look at them and when we've talked about them, it doesn't read as Apple sensed a problem and then is using AI to solve it. All of them are. Apple had an agenda to push AI and into their operating system and found places to stick it, which is not the same thing as solving a problem right organically because the problem existed. It's because they wanted to shove AI features in so they could make those claims. And if this, if I think the best news of this whole story is like I said earlier, when you're going great, there's no reason to change anything. And I have to hope that after lots of behind the scenes grousing about Siri for 10 years and about AI for the last couple of years, that this may be finally serves as a kind of a punch in the gut to Apple to make them say, oh, the way we're structured internally. Because I don't think this is a lazy program or somewhere. I don't think this is one bad Apple in the management camp. I think this is a cultural structural problem inside Apple that caused this to go on like this. And maybe it is the punch that they need to say, oh, we need to actually rethink things and change things and make things different. And what Alex says is absolutely right. Being able to rely on third party AI solutions and put it, put it in the APIs for iOS 19, providing APIs for developers to use Apple's models so that they don't have to bake in their own less efficient models. When you download an app and try to run it on your iPhone, like there are lots of things they could do that are more Apple like that they didn't do because they had this bad decision and I think a broken structure internally that led to this kind of dysfunction. And it's like it's easy to just ignore it when you're number one. And they've been number one for a long time. Maybe now they've finally gotten the message.
- [19:32]
Andy Ihnatko
I disagree slightly. I agree that it wasn't important to for the purposes of improving, proving the product, it was not important for them to ship Apple intelligence in late Start rolling it out in late 2024 and make serious upgrades in late. Excuse me, in 2025. Absolutely agree with that. However, we talked about this a little bit last week about how at that moment, that moment in June, Apple had just come off of two serious one hugely embarrassing development hitch and one slightly embarrassing one where they'd spent a billion dollars a year for 10 years on a car they decided never to ship. And they had spent the product, to.
- [20:14]
Leo Laporte
Their credit, they had never said anything about that car. Right, right.
- [20:16]
Andy Ihnatko
No, I'm saying. But, but it was well known that this, it was.
- [20:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but they never made the announcement. They didn't start running ads about, you're.
- [20:22]
Andy Ihnatko
Gonna love the Apple car, I'm going somewhere with this. They had shipped, then they shipped the Apple Vision Pro which Tim had spent the past year or so hyping up in the limited way that Tim can hype up an unannounced product by saying, oh, we think VR is a very big thing. And yes, we're very, very looking forward to, we're doing stuff like that. Okay. I think that it was very, very important for them to make a clear statement that we haven't let AI pass us by. We've been working on AI since, for the past, since 20, 2016, 2017 or earlier. Here is our roadmap for AI. Because you can't just simply, as Apple has proven, you can't just announce a roadmap and then start shipping something a year later. That's a 10 year process to get where everybody else is right now. Okay? So they least it was very important to analysts, to their own culture to indicate that we're not just thinking that this is, this is something simple that we can knock off. We're not thinking that this is something that we can absolutely ignore. This is potentially something like, like support for the Internet, support for the World Wide Web, support for WI Fi. And we promise you that if you buy a computer, a Mac today or an iPhone today that's supposed to last five or six or seven years, it's not going to be functionally obsolete in five or six years because in that time we will have developed our own in house stuff. So I can see the pressure that there was some pressure that was necessary. However, where they've really screwed up is they could have just simply said this is a long road. We have noticed the missteps of our competitors, the serious missteps of our, of our competitors in spreading disinformation, in creating deep fakes. And we don't, we don't care to repeat those mistakes so that we will proceeding. We will be proceeding carefully and slowly and we have no timetable to announce as yet. However, here is our vision for the future. That would have been absolutely sufficient. But I don't, I don't think that that Apple had the option of say of pretending that. Oh well, yeah, I mean we, we allowed the OpenAI app and the ChatGPT app into the App Store. So we got it. No, they have, they have to be able to show it. They got some skin in the game.
- [22:29]
Jason Snell
But there was a spectrum there. Right. Like they didn't need the features. That didn't ship. They didn't need to announce, I don't think. Right. Like Genmoji seems like a pretty no brainer. I don't love image Playgrounds, but Genmoji.
- [22:38]
Leo Laporte
Seems I have actually deleted image playgrounds.
- [22:41]
Jason Snell
Not good. It's so far behind the state of the artist bad. And the writing tool stuff is fine. Again, there's stuff in there that's fine. Andy's right though. They did feel like they're behind the eight ball, right. They're like how do we make a move here? And, and you know what? They were under pressure and it turns out, here's the funny thing, it turns out ye, yeah, they were way behind. They were caught flat footed and they made some rash decisions that are coming back to hurt them now. But the real question is not, you know, details about why they made this, this decision. The real question is what do they have? Are those features dead? Are they coming back? What are they and what are they going to announce in June and are they going to learn from the last year? Because remember those were on Rapple or on Apple terms, rash decisions. Right? Like Apple doesn't do things in six months. A turn like that, that doesn't happen. And they did it this time and we see the result. So like what have they learned in the last year and are they going to change direction? Are they going to stay the course? Are they going to throw features out and put different features in? Are they going to pretend it never happened? I that's a real good question. June is going to be very interesting and I'll point out that that not just Jon Gruber, but all of us are going to add no matter what our level of skepticism is about anything Apple says in its all of us took a, you know, a step like +5 to skepticism wherever you started. We're all more skeptical now than we were a year ago.
- [24:05]
Leo Laporte
And the real challenge, I don't you remember nobody Nobody. No. John, no, no. Jon Gruber of Amazon, which doesn't exist, of course, wrote an article saying, geez, Amazon promised smart Alexa plus a year ago and they still don't have it. Oh my God. They lied. Because nobody expects anything from Amazon or Google. But the real question is, wouldn't you.
- [24:25]
Jason Snell
Say that that means that people who used to expect something from are now much less inclined to expect something from actual. That they're now more like the rest of them?
- [24:33]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean the thing is, is that, you know, all of life is a confidence game. And, and when people start losing confidence, things start to fall apart really quickly. You know, there's a lot of things that are held together just because we all stop at stop signs and stop lights because we have the confidence that everyone else is going to do it and everyone has the confidence that we're going to do it. You know, but it's all a game actually.
- [24:52]
Leo Laporte
If you know everybody's going to stop, you blow it it you run right through it, to be honest.
- [24:57]
Alex Lindsay
But the point is we stop because.
- [24:59]
Leo Laporte
We think they're not stopping.
- [25:01]
Alex Lindsay
There's so many things that we do that are all live inside confidence, a trust, a confidence. And the reality distortion only works when that reality distortion is followed up with something that is a result, looks like a result. And if that fades away, then absolutely. And I do think it's fading away.
- [25:20]
Leo Laporte
You know, like the only thing that matters should matter to anybody. You know, only thing that matters to me is Gruber. Right. That there's a structural problem at Apple. You know, I'm sorry he got butthurt. I'm sorry people's faith in Apple was destroyed.
- [25:36]
Jason Snell
This is a structural problem and we've seen it because Siri's been so bad for so long and they hired John Giandrea from Google, what, five years ago, longer and he was going to fix Siri and fix all their machine learning stuff and all of that. And yet they have been. I mean part of it is a tactical problem which is they looked somebody. Apple certainly raised their hand and said, hey, LMS are a thing. And, and senior people at Apple were like, nah, forget it, it's dumb. It's never going to amount to anything. And that was a mistake. But I do think that if you look at this, there seems to be a real, I got it, you take it kind of thing going on between Craig Federighi who's in charge of software and John Gian Drea who is in charge of AI and whatever. You know, in the end we can speculate about what's broken in there, but the. What ships is what matters. And Siri's a mess. And Mark Gurman says they're not going to get new conversational Siri until 2027. Like, it's not good.
- [26:31]
Leo Laporte
Even if Apple hadn't. I mean, what if Apple had never even mentioned AI and just shipped a few things they shipped, wouldn't they be in the same boat? People would say, oh, Apple's missing the bus.
- [26:42]
Jason Snell
Yes.
- [26:42]
Leo Laporte
So it doesn't.
- [26:44]
Jason Snell
I think it would be worse. I think that there is a more broad public perception now that Apple is on it, even if they're struggling, even if it's messy. And honestly, those ads, as misleading as we say they are, I think if you asked a member of the general public if Apple stuff does AI, they'd say yes.
- [27:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they were.
- [27:04]
Alex Lindsay
And I think, I think one thing that they're missing is I don't think that the leadership right now is the same level of strength that of course it had under, under some. You know, a lot of the corporations that you see moving really quick often move because they have a strong man as the CEO, like someone who, you know, whether it was Leger at T Mobile or Jensen at Nvidia or, you know, you know, those types of things where you have somebody who is pointing the ship very rigorously and that person can destroy the ship as well. Like, like there's that. We're seeing that in other, in other companies right now. But the, but the point is, is that, that, that, that growth of making decisions and whether that person has good taste or not. And in, in Apple's case, Steve had good taste, but I don't feel like after he left, there hasn't been somebody else with this kind of singular vision of this is what we need to do or this is what we're all about. There's a lot of people that are having a lot of meetings that have a lot of things going on and it's. Which is a typical corporation problem, but it's not. It doesn't have that singular vision which has allowed Apple to expand into a lot of other places. But I do think it has taken their eye off of the, the original ball, whether that's plus or minus. And I think that makes. I think that that's why we see more features than stability. I think that's why we see more announcements than products. Those all are things that are absolutely very common with large corporations that are making decisions by committee.
- [28:27]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And also the thing we have to remember about Apple is that My theory of all businesses, particularly tech businesses, is that there is one machine in the basement that is responsible for generating all of the money, or at least so much of the money that it is really the entire business. And everything has to enhance the operation and the function of this machine. For Apple, it is hardware, hardware, hardware, hardware. Every question has to be at some point filtered through the question, how will this help us sell more iPhones? How will this help us sell more Macs, more iPads, more AirPods? And yes, they have services, but I think that that's still one of the biggies. So when you ask them a question like, AI is not. Whereas Google is in a position where their machine is services, what can we turn into services? Particularly, what can we turn into cloud services? What can we turn to cloud computing services? AI is an absolute natural fit and also a feature that will help you, that will help Android users continue to use the phone and continue to feed information into the ecosystem. Apple doesn't have that. So when you. You ask them internally, when they debate, what should we do with AI? There's no obvious answer to the question, how will this help us sell phones? Or how will this help us sell services in the short term? And that's, I think, where they can often do things that are hard to predict from the outside.
- [29:46]
Alex Lindsay
I think one of the things that's really hard here is that Siri is the obvious one that if you could fix it, it would be a huge deal. Like, I get on a drive, I open up ChatGPT and I sit there and talk to ChatGPT all the way through the drive, asking it questions about something I'm trying to figure out that's what I want to do with Siri. Like, you know, and. And so. And the only thing that bugs me about it is that it I have to go find the app. I can't just ask, say, hey, Shlomo, what is this? And get a reason. Like, my. My wife asked Siri something the other day and I was like, what are you doing? And I just opened up, like, Siri came up with some kind of crazy answer. And I was like, why are we asking Siri that? That's not what she does. She does timers and she does the weather and the sunrise. Like, like that's what she knows how.
- [30:27]
Leo Laporte
To do with Lisa. She'll ask Siri things. And I said, I just know this. Like, you're not going to get an answer.
- [30:35]
Alex Lindsay
But. But it was like, it was. What's interesting, though, is that I asked. We asked, of course, Chat GPT. And it gave this very complete answer. And then it gave us some extra stuff that you might want to know. And then we said, well, what about this? And then it gave us a whole bunch of other stuff and it was magical. Like it was a magical. Right, yeah.
- [30:56]
Leo Laporte
So this is something Om Malik actually does say. He has an update to his piece and he says, my premise that Apple did this for the market was disputed by a lot of a number of Wall street insiders who said no, if Apple cared about the market, they'd focus on their profit maker and they wouldn't be worried about this kind of stuff. So this wasn't really. I mean, he disputes. And I may be. Don't know if I agree with that, that this was done because Apple had to for the market. Maybe there was.
- [31:30]
Alex Lindsay
I think it's absolutely the market because I think that it is because the market. But the market is not the issue.
- [31:36]
Leo Laporte
Apple's got things they can talk about though, like Apple silicon and yeah, everybody have so many. And the cameras and the iPhone. There's so many good things they can talk about that are reasons people actually buy.
- [31:47]
Alex Lindsay
But you have a bunch of Android that are asking you every meeting, what are you doing about AI? What are you doing about AI? What are you doing about AI? And then you have this little echo chamber of people who say, well, Apple doesn't have a solution for this. And then you have. Then you have the idiots who are the stockbrokers who don't know really anything about anything. They just kind of listen to the analysts and they sit there and buy and sell and everything else. But the problem is that you talk to any employee who works at a company with lots of stock options. When the stocks hit a start sliding, there's a huge morale problem because that's the cost of. It's not the stock. The most important stockholders in a company are the employees and they have all of this. They've taken lower salaries for higher stock options, which works great as long as it's going, but it's a bit of a Ponzi. Well, I mean, everybody's stock is going down right now, but Apple would have been going down early too.
- [32:42]
Leo Laporte
Apple might have been more worried that people would start buying Android phones because, I mean, all of the things that they promote in these ads and a Google Pixel 9 can do. Right.
- [32:53]
Jason Snell
This is, this is I think, ultimately explained entirely by being a defense against the potential future where AI features are enough to make you not buy an Apple product. Right. And I don't even think that and this may be part of the problem. I don't even think that this is an effort to make sure that Apple is a leader in AI enabled features. I think it's literally a defensive move to say it kills us. I mean the people switching to AI PCs over Macs I guess is a little bit of a problem. Although the Mac is so open in terms of software that, that it probably doesn't matter. But on the iPhone like Apple's got this is the downside of it being so locked down is there are apps on the iPhone but if you want it interwoven with your operating system like that's, that is the existential risk. Maybe not this year but like if they don't start down the path is there a point where random consumer says well I need to get a Samsung or, or a Google phone because Apple doesn't do whatever that thing is, that is what I need to do with my phone. And that, that could kill, I mean kill half of their revenue if they, if so it's existential. So that's what they're playing defense against.
- [34:07]
Leo Laporte
They are, they are protecting them. Their chief product John Gerard in our club Twit Discord says because of the Apple ads my sister and sister in law were asking about it and wanting to upgrade their old iPhone to take advantage of the AI. Before that all I'd heard was AI stealing my data and I'll never use it. So maybe Apple's not completely misguided here.
- [34:31]
Jason Snell
Maybe they just gotta deliver and that's ultimately, you know, John could get mad about the marketing and all those things but I think what he's really mad about and I think that we all need to look at is Apple has failed to deliver. That's what's going on here is they failed to deliver AI things when other people were and they're behind their image model isn't very good. The, the, you know, they promise some features that we're going to differentiate them and they, they can't ship them. And that's the, I think the most troubling thing. The good news is, and I got, I'm going to be Mr. Optimistic here for a moment. Moment. The good news is I think the events of the last six months suggest that AI models are more of a commodity and that you know, it's not, it's highly unlikely that somebody like Google invents an AI thing that blows everybody away. That is not replicable by literally every other company if they've got enough time and money. And if that's the case. That's an advantage for Apple because it doesn't really matter that they're behind because it's not something that's going to be the crown jewels. That AI is going to be much more of a commodity that's easy to generate.
- [35:33]
Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that it feels like they blinked. You know, like you feel like in a lot of ways you feel like Apple is this giant ship that doesn't really pay attention to anybody else and just kind of plow. Whether they do or not, it just feels like they're just always just, they're just making great products and people are, they're just happy that people are showing up, that kind of thing. And in this case it just feels desperate to say a bunch of things that aren't that aren't there. Like you just had to do it and you're just not worried. I think that John and most of us are not used to seeing Apple look desperate.
- [35:59]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a little bit like the first time that you've see your parents not drunk, but a little bit buzzed and they're a little bit silly and it's like, yeah, it's like, it's like you're used to thinking, wait a minute. They never like laugh and like just dance in the middle of the kitchen and have like have an egg fight in the middle, in the middle of the room. What is going on here? So the first time that Apple announces something and doesn't and clearly can't deliver it. Not only that, but it's. You start to think about what in Apple's corporate culture, what in their management system allowed them to screw up this badly to be able to say, okay, if there are conversations internally saying what can we promise? Promise and not even a fixed deadline, but vaguely when can we promise it? And so okay, we feel as though we can have this feature ready by A lot of this stuff could be ready in 2025. Let's say what failure happened so that no, they're not even close to it. There is a. I think it was German's column this week. Was it where they, someone or somebody mentioned that there was sort of a let's all feel good, let's all feel better about the horrible week we had Meeting all hands meeting at Siri in which one of the heads of project basically was showing off. Here's some stuff that's actually working so that at least the team can see. We haven't just been sort of like raiding the vending machine here. We actually have some work done and There is something we can build upon that's pretty shocking that that's where they are right now. And so that's, I think that's why this causing a lot of people to rethink a lot of these things. A lot of their impressions of Apple that were not Apple's responsibility. As I, as I often say, people think of Apple as hey, they're two hippies in a garage and hey, wow, they care about humanity and they are a $3.5 trillion company. They are as dysfunctional as any other huge tech company. They are as selfish as any other huge tech company.
- [38:01]
Leo Laporte
But they learned a lesson not to pre announce stuff. I mean that was always their tradition is don't pre announce. Maybe they felt like they had to. They have had.
- [38:09]
Andy Ihnatko
There were.
- [38:10]
Leo Laporte
Besides putting out the press release and the statement to Jon Gruber, they also have had to modify the Apple page about Siri. They've added some fine print print to the big paragraph that says with all new superpowers, Siri can assist you like never before. This is still on the Apple page. Awareness of your personal context enables Siri to help you in ways that are unique to you need to check when your mom's flight is arriving? Yeah, Siri, this is exactly by the way, what was in that Bella Ramsey ad. Siri can help you find what you're looking for without compromising your privacy. And then in the fine print, Siri's personal context understanding on screen awareness and in app applications are in development and will be available with a future software updates update. So they, I mean that's not exactly saying mea culpa. Maybe they should take that whole paragraph out.
- [38:57]
Andy Ihnatko
I think that this is we sometimes or I sometimes think that one of the things I've often said about Apple is that wow, unlike Google, unlike Microsoft, unlike a lot of other companies where I'm so aware of all of the internal fighting and backbiting and undermining that happens that wow, Apple seems to act with one concerned mind and that can be overstated. What happened? This debacle happened after a long series of, I'm sure very intense arguments inside Cupertino about marketing, engineering, the C suite, basically and the right, in this case, the people with the right argument lost that argument in a good healthy environment, which I think Apple is. That means that the next time that person or that group or that hunter makes that argument, they basically might be listened to a little bit harder. So hopefully, hopefully we won't see another embarrassment like this.
- [39:50]
Leo Laporte
Let's take a break. It's not really the big story of the week, but I, I couldn't, I couldn't resist. I just thought it was fascinating.
- [39:58]
Andy Ihnatko
There is tea. We must spill it.
- [40:00]
Leo Laporte
We have to spill it. Andy Inoco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. Mac Break Weekly continues in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, Bitwarden. I was, you know, I've been praising Bit Warden for a couple of years now and I was very pleased to see, I think it was Wyoming picked it now as the best password manager. And they said the same thing I've been saying, which is because it's open source, that makes such a difference to me. And I've always felt like any program that uses cryptography has to be open source so that experts can look at it. And you, if you're an expert in code, can look at it and say, yeah, it's doing what it says it's going to do. It does it with well known and trusted technologies and there's no backdoors, that kind of thing. And you can assure yourself with Bit Warden. All that's true. That's why Bitwarden is the trusted leader and not just in passwords, but in secrets and like your API keys and things and pass key management as well. 10 million users know this across 180 countries. What you may not know is Bitwarden is also great for business. Over 50,000 business customers worldwide. In fact, they've entered 2025 as the essential security solution for organizations of all sizes. Consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2. Recognized as a leader in software reviews data quadrant, Bitwarden continues to protect businesses worldwide. So maybe I could talk about a feature that you might be particularly important this time of year. It's tax season, right? For years I would get calls on the radio show from tax preparers saying, well, actually more like from customers saying, my tax preparer wants me to mail the email them all of my information. Is that secure? No. But Bitwarden will let you securely send your financial documents to your accountant or tax preparer. They've got a feature called Bitwarden Send. Every preparer should be using this and you should be using it. End to end encryption, open source, ensuring your tax forms remain protected. And what's great is the preparers, the recipients don't even need an account to access them. Bitwarden's so great. Avoid risky email attachments that give your personal information to anybody who can intercept them. Instead, share confidential tax documents and anything private with password protection. You can put expiration dates in it after April 15th. This data is no longer good. You can have view limits, which means you can have full control over who can see your sensitive information. You know There are new findings from Bitwarden and 451 Research. This is a study they commissioned that highlighted highlights. Despite the rise of multi factor two factor, 65% of enterprises don't use it. They rely solely on passwords. So strong pass and passkeys, forget it. So the strong password management is really important in security and compliance strategies. And of course Bit Warden supports two factor multi factor in Bit Warden so it makes it convenient and easy to use so you can encourage your employees to use use it. Password management has been cited as the top IAM challenge for 35% of organizations and only 21% implement passwordless. Only 21% implement passwordless enterprises. Facing ongoing credential security risks, Bitwarden offers enterprises essential tools to strengthen their security posture. End to encryption, MFA enforcement, secure password sharing. These all address both current password dependencies and future authentication needs. This is so important for your business and it's also important because if it's complicated, no one's going to use it. So Bitwarden really prioritizes simplicity. It has to be easy to set up. It should only take a few minutes. Bitwarden supports importing from most password management solutions, so it's a seamless transfer. And as I said, Bit Warden is open source. That's really important. It means it can be inspected by anyone. It is regularly audited by third party experts and they always publish the full report because they are open, they're transparent. Can't say that for everyone. Your business deserves an effective solution for enhanced online security. Use the password manager I use. Steve Gibson uses the only one we recommend. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise planner. Get started for free across all devices is as an individual user. Bitwarden.com TWiT check it out@bitwarden.com TWiT we really love Bitwarden and I think you will too, especially for your business. And if you have friends and family who are not using a password manager, I beg of you, tell them about Bitwarden. It's free for individuals, free forever and they need to use it. Bitwarden.com TWIT here's some good news. Apple executives believe you will love the upcoming iOS overhaul.
- [45:02]
Jason Snell
What a relief. They're still living down the last time where they said that nobody wants this and nobody's going to like our stuff and it's a weird marketing choice. So I'm glad they're back on the train now, on the wagon.
- [45:14]
Leo Laporte
You may remember we talked last week. Mark Gurman reported iOS19 is going to be, quote, what, one of the most dramatic software overhauls in its history. And now Bloomberg reports Apple executives are confident. Do you think it was a phone call where they called up and said, I just want you to know, Mark, we're confident you're going to love it.
- [45:33]
Andy Ihnatko
The users will love it. Off the record, no attribution, on deep background, we think this is good.
- [45:40]
Leo Laporte
We have learned from Vision OS that people love round icons. They love a. The redesign will span across Apple's biggest platforms. It will, according to Gurman, look a little bit like Vision os. They'll adopt the design principles introduced in Vision os. By the way, are we going to get Gurman on next week? Is that true?
- [46:01]
Jason Snell
Working on it.
- [46:01]
Leo Laporte
We can ask him. Mark, how do you know Apple executives believe users will love the upcoming overhaul. It's interesting that obviously Apple planted that. It's interesting that Apple felt the need to plant that.
- [46:16]
Andy Ihnatko
Well, who knows? But it's, I mean, we talked a little bit about this last week about how iOS7 was the last huge overhaul of at least the mobile os and they really had to walk a lot of the direction, that direction back and make it a little bit more productive. But one thing that I've been thinking of the last week though is like, so the rumors about folding phones, folding MacBook, folding, iPad are starting to accelerate. What if as part of this overhaul, they're trying to give macOS a redesign to make a little bit more sense? If it had a touch interface, like if they were to create a foldable MacBook that when unfolded could be just a 16 inch tablet that could be used in and of itself. Itself.
- [47:08]
Jason Snell
Yeah, it is. If you think about their stories about chips, right, that every M chip that gets generated is they know what all the systems are that are going to use that chip. Like that's part of their integrated model. There is no way you would build a next generation cross operating system design language without anticipating your next few years of products on the roadmap. Like if There's a touchscreen MacBook, like maybe, maybe. Because we've heard those rumors and it's like, well, of course that would be one of the challenges that they would want to address in doing a new design like this.
- [47:42]
Leo Laporte
Gurman also talks in his Sunday Power on newsletter, which has become a staple of this program. Four new iPhones, including an iPhone 17 Air. Well, now that's not this Year is it or is it? No, that would be next year. Next year, Next year. But he says this year there is.
- [48:01]
Jason Snell
Going to be 17 airs this year? This fall.
- [48:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it is this year. Oh yeah, 17. Sorry, I can't count. We have 16 now. Right, okay, thank you. The company will roll out one entry level phone. Well I think they already did that. The 16E. Right. Two high end models.
- [48:17]
Jason Snell
He means 17. The base model 17.
- [48:20]
Leo Laporte
17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max and then a 17 Air. Okay, that all makes sense, right? Yeah. It will be thinner than the rest. There is some chatter that it might not have ports. This might be the one everybody's been talking about.
- [48:35]
Jason Snell
German says no, Gurman says that they thought about ports in something that I looked in our notes. Andy and I both twigged too where he's like they're afraid that the EU will be angry at them for eliminating usbc which is stupid. And I'm sure that that is not that. Maybe, maybe Gurman's source said that. But there's no way cuz there's a specific carve out if you have no ports the EU doesn't care that you don't have USB C. It's only if you have ports.
- [49:00]
Andy Ihnatko
They have a separate document that's an explainer Q and A. But what does this mean? And as Jason said it is explicit that says that if your device, if your phone does not have any ports whatsoever such as charged only by wireless charging, it is not affected by this. So yeah, so I don't know where he was going there.
- [49:19]
Leo Laporte
So this report did not come from Mark Gurman. The port free rumor. I don't know where it came from. Let me see, I'm trying to find it. Sonny Dixon, Sonny Dickson actually shared some. He's a long time, usually pretty reliable especially when it comes to things like the supply chain. He showed the slugs the dummies of the first iPhone 17. Here's the four different models. It has buttons.
- [49:46]
Andy Ihnatko
So these are supposedly basically what the case manufacturers are betting on the phone looks like. But it really.
- [49:52]
Leo Laporte
But it really Apple.
- [49:54]
Andy Ihnatko
Well who knows. It's unsourced but it is. This is. These are products that are. That are commissioned by case manufacturers to have a physical object that they can put inside purported case. But it does mean that what you have these large companies that are putting lots and lots of money on tooling. They would not be, they would not be speculating on what it looks like they were based on. They're based on designs that they think are pretty good or at Least good enough to get a head start on. But it is. And unlike the renders and unlike the CAD files we've been seeing beforehand, it is kind of fun to see them as actual physical objects, particularly stacked up next to each other. I think that the camera bump is probably going to be controversial for some people because it is such a non. It is such a, such a. Such a detour for Apple's phone design language. But it does open up a lot of possibilities, I think, for case design and for camera design.
- [50:50]
Leo Laporte
The new Air will, according to Gurman, have the C1 modem that was in the iPhone 16e. Better battery life. We're seeing that. Right? More responsive data in congested conditions. But the new M3 Air iPad. Do not have it. Does not have it. Nor does the regular iPad. Nothing. Nor the MacBook Air. So although maybe this is a chance to do a cellular Mac once they get the internal modem working.
- [51:23]
Jason Snell
I think the one that surprised me was promotion, because that is a thing that we've talked about here, how the table stakes for phones are getting to the point where Apple's lower refresh models look a little bad. And Gurman says that this Air, which is not a pro phone, will still have promotion motion.
- [51:44]
Leo Laporte
It will.
- [51:45]
Jason Snell
Yeah, that's good. That's what he says. And I wonder, and honestly, I wonder if some of it is actually power savings, which seems weird because a higher refresh rate would seem like it might be a problem. But I believe those phones also, those screens have the ability to ramp down the frame rate when they're not in use. And if that's a, if that's a power saver, sounds like a lot of decisions were made because this is going to be a thinner phone, which means the overall battery volume is less. And they're trying to keep. He says they will keep the battery level basically the same as in other models. And that means. Means that they're finding every way they can possibly save on power.
- [52:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, then there's this foldable phone that wouldn't be this year to be next year.
- [52:27]
Jason Snell
Yeah, next year or the year after.
- [52:29]
Leo Laporte
He says, yeah, that's interesting. Next year.
- [52:34]
Andy Ihnatko
Ming Shi Kuo had a piece last week that was basically adding a couple of details, but also rounding up all of the information he thinks he, he's put together over the past year. And so one of the things that. One of the highlights of his report and this new report is that it is going to be a premium phone. It's going to cost like 2,000, $2,500. Which makes sense. I mean that's what a folding phone costs. These panels are just not cheap. And also this is. We talked about how Apple's machine is a machine that makes profits based on selling high end hardware with a good markup. This is absolute catnip for the iPhone product line, I guess.
- [53:09]
Alex Lindsay
I mean I have like, I was like negative interest. Not even, not even zero interest in a foldable phone. Every person I know that has bought a foldable phone didn't buy a second one. Like so far like it just their, their next upgrade. The foldable phone was like a moment that they had and then it became so problematic that it was that they. I just don't. Just seems. It seems.
- [53:31]
Jason Snell
But this is the moment where Apple says now it's worth doing right. And that's the question is it's easy to say, you know, when he wants an ipod with a video. Right. Like it is.
- [53:39]
Alex Lindsay
I get it.
- [53:39]
Jason Snell
Maybe this is the moment. I mean Gurman's report says that they basically gotten the wrinkle out of the center of the screen. And while I share your skepticism about this as a use case, I don't know. Apple has the good tablet and the OS supports tablet apps really well. And by all accounts this seems to be a nice iPhone that unfolds into an iPad mini. And that is an interesting use case to me.
- [54:05]
Alex Lindsay
That's super awesome.
- [54:07]
Andy Ihnatko
Particularly if it's thin. Particularly when it's folded. It's thin. And we've seen like Oppo, I think Oppo has a new phone out that is. It is. When you fold it, it's only marginally, marginally thicker than an iPhone 16. And the only cost that app, that iPhone fold users might pay is they might not get that really great array of cameras they would get with the top of the line. IPhone 17.
- [54:29]
Jason Snell
Probably more like the air.
- [54:31]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, that's.
- [54:33]
Andy Ihnatko
I feel like I found the turns into an iPad is. I don't have. I don't have. Let me make it clear. I don't have $2,000, let alone 25 dol to spend on a phone. But if I were at another higher level of money, that would be very much in line with my interest. I do know some people who are. I think Alex is right that it's not a mainstream product partly because of the price. But the progress has been made since Samsung made their first fold which was a semi disaster. The ditch is no longer really noticeable. They're now really flat. They're a lot more reliable, they're a lot more durable. They will never be as durable as a standard slab foam, but they're a lot more durable. And I do know a lot of people that have replaced their first fold foldable with another foldable.
- [55:14]
Leo Laporte
Do you see a lot of foldables out in the wild? Interesting in my, in my group.
- [55:18]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. I don't, I don't. I have to say that I have never seen someone on public transportation or even just like out in the Boston, Boston Common using one. But that doesn't mean there, there's a reason why all these.
- [55:29]
Leo Laporte
Every major club or the polo matches and there are a lot of people with them, I find. Yeah, actually I have the. I, I like the flip but see that's, that's not for me this is going the other direction. This is to make a smaller form factor that then folds out to a normal size phone.
- [55:47]
Andy Ihnatko
There are a lot of really cool. This is why I love foldable displays that there are so many ways to change up the paradigm that we've been stuck with for now like 10, 15 years with phones and for 20 or 30 years with laptops. I love the idea that designers who only have stuff in their sketchbooks that gosh, wouldn't be nice to be able to do this sometime can now actually realize it. There's an Android manufacturer that I can't remember the name but they. This is why like Android and Windows, this is one of the, one of the things that are singularly wonderful about them. There are so many manufacturers that there's room to try out really weird things and see if they fly. So there's one Android phone designer that, not a major one that's decided to do a slab style folding phone so it folds out into a regular sized phone but make it fold twice so that it folds into like a box of Tic Tacs sort of thing. And I don't know if there's a market for that but I'm glad that someone is trying to make it and see if for the 1,000 people in the world who are like oh my God, finally something that I can put into a compact purse are now have like a smartphone they can put into. I love to. Failures are just as illustrative as successes because here's what we've done. We tried it people but here's what people, the people who liked it, liked this part of it. We will carry this over to the next design and try again.
- [57:08]
Leo Laporte
I watched last night. I was just because I wanted to catch up on 2013's vision of AI. I watched her again and he has A little, really little phone that opens up, that unfolds, that he carries around in his pocket.
- [57:24]
Andy Ihnatko
See, that's an idea that I wish that people hadn't given up on. I love the idea of two screens separated by a mechanical hinge because damn, obviously if people have a problem with a ditch, they're not going to like a gap that's actual hinge. But the idea of so many different applications where you're reading or consuming media, where left page and right page are absolutely a working paradigm. So many use cases where I want to have my email app open on the left page. I want to have a notes taking app or calendar app open in the right page. Or even just the ability to fold it, use it like a traditional laptop that has 180° ° screen. I want to be able to fold it back upon itself and basically have it as an easel so I can be watching videos while I'm having lunch. I really wish they hadn't given up on that quite so quickly because that's one of my favorite form factors. I thought there was a lot of potential there.
- [58:16]
Leo Laporte
Another thing Gurman points out is this week the Apple 100 off site is happening. All the top 100 executives, this is something Steve Jobs pioneered go off site night. Now I, Gruber said that Steve, remember, brought the mobile me group together in the auditorium and said, you guys are, you're ruining our reputation, et cetera. I just wonder if maybe when they all go to and they're sitting at the giant teacups or something at Disneyland, if they, if, if they don't have a little, if Tim Cook just doesn't say something to him. Gurman doesn't think so because there's enough responsibility for the AI film failure to go around. He says the company's marketing heads, Jaws and Bob Borchers are ultimately responsible. But then there's Tor Myron's marketing communications team which made the TV ads. They earlier this year made the Squish ad Craig Federighi that couldn't integrate the features in a compelling fashion. Of course, John Gennadrea, who gets all the heat because he's leading the AI group, the product manager and of course Cook. So he says given the nature of the collective failure, you're all fired. We're going to start over and put somebody else in charge anyway. I wonder where they're going. Do you know where they're going? Anybody? Just be fun to see 100 Apple executives all at the, at Disney World.
- [59:38]
Jason Snell
God, I don't know.
- [59:41]
Andy Ihnatko
No, I get, I could I get to sit in the front seat of the Millennium Falcon. No, I get to sit in the front seat of millennial Falcons.
- [59:48]
Alex Lindsay
I think this one. I think this one might be more like Esalen. You know, they need to.
- [59:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're gonna really need to think here. Yeah, a lot of whiteboard activity and beanbags involved.
- [59:58]
Andy Ihnatko
What shall we do about the working class? I tire of their petty, petty claims for compensation for the work that they.
- [60:07]
Leo Laporte
If you're gonna do that, you got to go up to the redwoods at the Bohemian Grove if you really want a plan to take over the world. Actually, next, Intelligent Machines. Tomorrow we have the executive of the Future of Humans Institute who is a very respected physicist at UCSC and AI expert. This was the group that put out that letter to pause AI for six months. They're really concerned about superintelligence. Like they think it's an extinction event for humans. So this should be interesting to most Tomorrow. You may be happy that Apple AI is just making little emojis and doesn't really want to take over the world or anything. So I'm actually really looking forward to hearing what. What's the worst that could happen? And the good news, iPhone owners won't even know it's happening. All right, we're. Take a little break. Future of Life Institute. Thank you. F O L I Folly. They probably don't use that acronym. Should be fine. Anthony Aguir will be joining us tomorrow on Intelligent Machines. Thank you, Anthony. Our show today brought to you. We'll have more with MacBreak Weekly in just a bit, including a fabulous Vision Pro segment. We're.
- [61:21]
Jason Snell
We're going to rock out.
- [61:23]
Leo Laporte
Rock out. And T. Vision Pro goats shall be this episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Did I ever tell you James Hetfield said I have a very nice voice? There's a. There's a story there, but we'll save that for later. Enterprises have spent billions of dollars on firewalls and VPNs. How's that working out for y'all? Well, breaches continue to rise by an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks. $75 million record payout last year. Year. So I guess those perimeter defenses really aren't. Aren't working as you'd hoped. Traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface with public facing IPs. That's something that bad guys can hang their hat on and more easily than ever with AI tools. They're really getting clever if you listen to security now they have some. It's amazing what they're doing. And they instruct. We had a story, it was fascinating. Last week, Steve was talking about a hacker gang that got in through a vpn, you know, and they browsed around and they couldn't, they couldn't set off their ransomware bombs. So they found a camera, a security camera that was running Linux and they were able to hack that. And they actually ran the ransom. They ran the whole thing from the software in the camera. And all of this is because AI makes this easier, right? And then of course, once the, this is, this was the problem. Once people get in, they get through those perimeter defenses. Most security just assumes, well, anybody inside the network is good, they're an employee. So what do bad guys do? They can, they can go anywhere inside the network. They look for things like those cameras to attack. They look for where you back stuff out up. And they also start exfiltrating embarrassing information, customers, customer information, emails, that kind of thing. And of course, your, your perimeter defenses struggle to inspect that encrypted traffic at scale. So it's, there's, it's easy for them to leak that out. Here's the bottom line. Hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it with AI to outpace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. Do not let bad actors win. They're innovating. They're exploiting your defenses. You need Z Scan Zero Trust plus AI. How does it work? Well, for one thing, it hides your attack surface, making apps and IPs invisible. That's huge just by itself. But they also eliminate that lateral movement I was talking about. They can't find the other holes in your system. Users are only allowed to connect to specific apps that they are explicitly authorized to use, not the entire network. And zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. Plus, you'll like it because it simplifies your job. With AI powered automation for security management, Zscaler analyzes half a trillion daily transactions looking for those threats, those needles in that giant haystack. How do they do it? With AI, of course. Hackers cannot attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. You can learn more at Zscale Zscaler.com Security that's Zscaler.com Security. We thank them so much for supporting Mac Break weekly. And will you support us when you use that address? So please do zscaler.com security let's do the Vision Pro. Segment now. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk about a little head banging from Jason Snell. You've been watching that Metallica Vision Pro.
- [65:27]
Jason Snell
Vision Pro.
- [65:31]
Leo Laporte
Sorry, I've seen good things about the band. Is very happy with the Vision Pro.
- [65:39]
Alex Lindsay
Metallica. Metallica concert sits on the front edge of a lot of this stuff. I mean, if you say there's a new technology, Metallica. Where do we sign up?
- [65:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Which is great.
- [65:47]
Alex Lindsay
That way forever. Yeah.
- [65:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So you've watched it anybody?
- [65:50]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, watched it a couple times and I.
- [65:51]
Leo Laporte
How long is it? It's long, right?
- [65:53]
Jason Snell
It's three songs. For an Apple Immersive, it's long.
- [65:56]
Leo Laporte
I thought it was the whole concert, three songs. Okay.
- [65:59]
Jason Snell
But for an Apple Immersive, it's longer. I think it's like 20 minutes, half an hour. I mean, it's like.
- [66:02]
Alex Lindsay
And it's 22.
- [66:03]
Jason Snell
And it's a doc. It's not just the performances. It has the performances, but it has the thing where they like also you see them behind the scenes and you hear them talking between the song before the songs and. And that's. That's good. It. I'm as always, super curious what. What Alex thinks about this, but I'll just say it simultaneously reinforced in me just how amazing this technology is and that Apple is still trying to overproduce it. I felt like I don't want to sound like an old man here. And I know Ben Thompson, it's protector, was like they should just have one camera angle for the whole concert, which. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But if I.
- [66:43]
Leo Laporte
To capture the band's full performance, there's.
- [66:45]
Jason Snell
A tempo that you want where it's like, cut, cut, cut. And the tempo is, I'd say twice as fast as it should be. It just. There are too many times where I'm getting in the scene and I'm looking over there and then there's a cut and I'm looking at nothing and I have to go find the person again. And that happens in Immersive. But the solution is you got to cut less. It doesn't mean you can't cut. It doesn't mean you can't use other cameras. It's really effective. There are some amazing moments is when they come down to the front of the stage and are singing with. With the fans in the front row. And as he walks away, as Hetfield walks away, it's the camera stays on the fans who completely lose it and start crying and are hugging each other. Cause they can't believe the moment they've just had and you get to witness it and you couldn't do that. Plus they're on a giant stage where they're often there are like 50 yards apart from each other. So you really couldn't do it as a single camera. But I do think, and it really is amazing but I think are still producing it too much. I think that there, there need to be fewer cuts. It needs to feel like you're immersed in a way that you can't if it's cutting every five seconds.
- [67:52]
Leo Laporte
Filmed in Mexico City during the sold out second year finale of their M72 World Tour, Apple built a custom stage layout featuring 14 Apple Immersive Video cameras using the mix stabilized cameras, cable suspended cameras, remote control camera, dolly systems. And you see them in the video? Well I guess how could you not see them right? If you have that. That many. Yeah. What do you think Alex? Did they cut too rapidly?
- [68:20]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean one of the things I thought about watching it, I watched it a couple times just to kind of get it. You have to kind of watch it the first time you get the experience, then you watch the time, start analyzing things and, and I've, I've streamed Metallica and I've also, and I also went to see Metallica's Fathom event which was on in theaters. So I've seen a lot of different versions of, of this specific band and I think that one of the things I really realized there's this collision going on with the, with the current products that are going out is is the Apple Vision Pro a new film medium or is it an experience platform? And I think you got to decide when you make something whether you're trying to give someone an experience of being there or whether you're giving them 180 degree film.
- [69:04]
Leo Laporte
That's Ben Thompson's complaint. He said at no point did I feel like I was at the conference concert.
- [69:09]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. And, and, but, but there were parts of it that you know, so there.
- [69:12]
Leo Laporte
Were, it was a documentary.
- [69:13]
Alex Lindsay
And what I will say is it's some of the best concert experience that I've. And I do a lot of this, the best I've I've ever seen. Like, like it is really even at its, you know, rough edges. I mean and many of the other Apple releases in 180 degrees I have been very negative about like I just felt like they shouldn't even release them. You know the art, the concert for one the weekend. The like all those I just thought were horrible. But this is the first one, I was like, wow, this is really good. Now, there's a bunch of things I don't like, but this one's really. This one was, like, really enjoyable and really impressive. There's moments. There's a whole bunch of moments that I wouldn't do and I still wouldn't do. And then there were some moments that I wouldn't do that I was like, oh, that was a pretty good idea. So there's a trucking shot at the beginning behind James as he goes under the stage. And moving a camera like that in 180 degrees is not something we normally do. And it works so well. Like, it is just magical. Like, you know. And I was like, I'm writing that down. We're gonna do that more often. The. Almost every crowd shot could have been cut out, as far as I'm concerned. I hated the crowd shots. The one that James that Jason was talking about is an exception to that because he was there and then he walks away. But these random, like, cut to the crowd, many of them were way too close, and most of them were superfluous, in my opinion. The wide shots, sure, maybe one, but they did it too often because who cares? And then the shot with Lars by his drum set was just two feet too close. I know why they did it. They needed to put the camera on the thing on the riser rig. But the problem was, is it just wasn't quite right.
- [70:52]
Leo Laporte
Nobody wants to be that close to Lars Ulrich, any drummer, frankly.
- [70:57]
Alex Lindsay
There's a couple shots that they force you to look. Look up. And the. And the. The convergence doesn't work when you look up. So when you. So when you look up, it makes your eyes cross just a little bit because it's not quite. You don't want to. You don't want to put a 180 degree lens there. And so you always want people to kind of have this circle there. They did these black and whites that are not 180 degrees. They're 3D that were kind of faked into 180 degrees. And as a result, they're really big in front of you. And it was too close, too close. The black and white ones of each person. But one thing that they did there that I thought was really cool, they had a much softer mat on these, on the edges that kind of just faded. And I'm going to use that all the time. Like, I realized that there was something that instead of having this hard mat that's like a three or four or maybe five degree mat that sits on the edge and you look over and you see this black line where the 180 ends. I kind of like this idea of an iris that has this slow fade out that I hadn't seen before. I've never done it and haven't seen it before. And I was like, I love that because you don't know when to stop looking over to the side because it just kind of disappears to the side. Beautiful presentation there. The shots where James is like singing to the. Or some of the other ones are singing to the audience and the audience is reaching out towards them. It's a great 3D moment. You get the geometry. But it also felt. The wide shots all feel soft. Most of them felt a little soft. I didn't really feel like I was looking at 8k per eye. I don't think I was. I think it was more like 4k per eye, maybe 6k per eye. But it wasn't the full resolution that, that I think that the headset's capable of. But overall, I guess I would say it was a pretty exciting experience that as someone who owns the headset, you just feel like, oh, I can see this isn't, you know, this is the. It literally is the best concert experience I've had. That it was that when I wasn't there, you know, and, and, and so it's a great step forward. There's still a ton of room to grow for everyone. I cannot wait for the new camera to come out and people experiment because I, I will say to. Back to what was. What was mentioned about. It should be a single camera. You know, the stage that we used to use in 3210, which was the old ILM stage, Metallica actually rehearsed there, you know, for their tours. And I was like, man, if you took them and put them in the old stage they rehearsed in, lit it up and put a camera in there, you know, with some, you know, some mild effects and so on and so forth. I may enjoy that more. You know, to feel like they're doing a concert for me there rather than bouncing around the stage.
- [73:35]
Jason Snell
Well, it's. What, what is the concert? Right? This concert is a stadium concert, right? So you, you wouldn't shoot a stadium concert the same way you'd shoot a concert at a, at a different kind of venue. And it was additionally challenging. I agree with you about the, about the fan shots there. There are. It's just one of those. I actually wonder how much of this was Metallica and how much of it was Apple, because I Wonder if Metallica wanted it to feel a little more like a concert film. But the, the, the. There were way. And I praised that moment where they sing with the fans and all that. But like, there are way too many moments where I am really, really getting into the fact that the, the musicians are playing and performing and suddenly I gotta spend 10 seconds watching a bunch of people bounce around in the front row. And I don't care. I see them from the back in the, in the crane shots. I don't need to write like weird decisions.
- [74:25]
Alex Lindsay
And some of those are practical decisions that they don't have a shot. Yeah, they gotta cover. They're covering. They're papering over something. The, the biggest paper over of the whole thing was during Enter the Sandman. They never went, they never went to Kirk. Kirk is doing a solo and they never go to him. And, and they can't. That. You could tell it was the balls. I watched it. They have these bouncing balls that they, that they dropped.
- [74:48]
Jason Snell
It was covering. Yeah, they were covering.
- [74:49]
Alex Lindsay
The ball was.
- [74:50]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah. So they went to the ca. And it was pulled back from the drummer and it wasn't. Yeah, you could, you could see. But it's good. I mean, I agree 100%. Alex, this is really great. It is one of the best things that they've done. And yet I had that moment where I'm like, yeah, you're getting there. But this is not the end product. Like, it's just not. It's just a little like they're finding their way. And I agree. In a different space where they're not. I mean, literally at one point they are all like 50 yards apart from each other on this giant stage. And what, what do you do with that where you can't see the band? They're playing to the Giant Stadium audience. And that's great, but like you for this, it's actually kind of the wrong experience for that. So.
- [75:33]
Alex Lindsay
But it's great. Meta has run up against these rocks for years with the Quest and their streaming concerts. Is that you go to a stadium because it's really hard to get a band to put all the energy and time and effort and money into something that is only going to be played. It's really expensive because you got to pay them for what they would have made. That stadium. Stadium generated $8 million or $10 million for the band. Does Apple really want to pay them $8 million to play like in a warehouse? You know, and so, so the, so the. So it's hard to get bands to, you know, if you want all the effects, it's hard to get the bands to do that.
- [76:11]
Leo Laporte
Is there a time in the future, though, when this becomes less expensive and these headsets become more ubiquitous where bands will do this instead of touring or that concert goers will do this instead of spending a lot of money and time?
- [76:24]
Alex Lindsay
Well, I think, I think. I mean, obviously, I mean, I'm working project for that.
- [76:27]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [76:28]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, to theaters. So. So the.
- [76:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you want to move them to theaters, though? Not.
- [76:33]
Alex Lindsay
Well, the, the advantage of that is mostly that they're around each other. They're around 300 other people singing, not. Not by themselves on their headsets, you know, because I think. But. But I will say that, that I do think that there is a. There's some future where we build. Someone's going to build a studio that's designed for the headset, you know, and it's going to be kind of the Austin City Limits Tiny Desk. We. That would be smart, you know, like wexp. Is that right? The one in. Out of what, sorry, kxp? Yeah, in Seattle. Like, they all have these sets where the bands come in. You're not changing the set every time you're not on tour. Like, for instance, I think that I would. I would be super excited to see Tiny desk put a 180 degree camera. Like, that would be an incredible experience, you know, to see that. So those are the kind of things, those little spaces. I think we could. We'll see more of that. Like, Tiny Desk. Doing that would cost almost nothing because.
- [77:31]
Jason Snell
They already got the banners and this, you know, in the chat room. We're talking about this too. Like, concerts are special. Going to them is special. They're also one time only and maybe not in your town, and very expensive. And we can say, well, the Vision Pro is very expensive. Yes, it is. Although maybe in the long run these kinds of devices will be less expensive. But it doesn't matter if you've got the money, even if they don't come to your town and you can't afford to travel, whether it's money or because your family or whatever. Like, there are lots of reasons where you miss a great concert. And then I would say even for the artists, a little like live theater, which we've also talked about in terms of the Vision Pro. Like, they are ephemeral. Once the experience is over, it's over forever. And I think there's. If I was an artist, I'd think, well, wait a second, I'm going to still do all my dates. But I Also want to product that I can sell after the fact to all the people who couldn't come because they. All the seats were full or because we weren't in their town or because we had to cancel or whatever the reason they couldn't make it. And I can sell them that experience that gives me another product to sell that's not the same as a live product, but it's something that's better than, you know, our other ancillary. Like just the audio or just a concert film on prime video or something. Something like that, Yeah.
- [78:49]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, the. I mean, Taylor Swift, obviously, and Beyonce blew that door right wide open where people are, you know, it doesn't. I talked to a friend who's. Whose wife and daughter went to see the film, went to see the film of it a week before they went to see it live. It didn't matter to them. Like, they had tickets. They want tickets to all the things right. Connected to those. And so I think that those different experiences are going to be. And I do think that theatrical experiences will be interesting, but again, that they have the same challenge. Challenge. Fathom has had the same challenge that Apple has, which is that you're shooting, like, concert films. Like people, there's thousands of people. And that subtly tells you you're not there because there's, you know, the advantage of building a set without seeing a lot of other people is it feels like this is a concert for you, you know, and so I think that that's going to be the interesting thing that I think Apple's going to be able to take advantage of. We're already talking to venues. Like, I'm just waiting for that camera to drop. Like, so of which venues do we put the camera into? And using like, the sound checks at first just to capture two or three songs that, you know, for people to experience. So I think that a lot of us are, you know, super excited to see. And I. What's great about it is is that again, for the first time ever, we're months away, two or three months away from having a camera that isn't a science project. It. This has been. This whole system has been junked up by either low resolution, low frame rate, or really complicated. Those are the. Those and they've been huge bottlenecks. And regardless of. I mean, people think that 30, you know, $30,000 is a lot for a camera, but the reality is, is that that from a production camera perspective, it's $1,000, $1,500 a day to rent. It becomes something that you can, you know, you can go out and shoot with often. And I think we're going to see an explosion of experiments that a lot of them won't work, but I think a lot of them will. And again, I don't think that they exist without the headset. When we talk about the expense of the headset, an 8k per eye 90 frame per second headset is what drives 8k per eye 90 frame know. And I think that that's the thing that we're. It's going to be really interesting. It's going to be interesting. Summer.
- [80:49]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [80:49]
Leo Laporte
Metallica's new bassist, Robert Trujillo knew for the last 2003.
- [80:56]
Alex Lindsay
I think of him as the new bassist too.
- [80:58]
Leo Laporte
I still think of his new bassist, although I love him. Hollywood Reporter had an interview with him. He said when the band first saw it, he said it was very real. James, he said, was. Was like playing the drums as he's watching himself singing. Trujillo says, I found myself riffing and playing air guitar too. It's almost impulsive. That's what I think the reaction will be for anybody who watches it, Even people who have never seen Metallica or aren't familiar. It's hard not to get into. Pulled into the performance. He says, it's a very physical experience in a lot of ways. I would have loved to have this when I was a kid in the 70s enamored with bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Imagine seeing Jimi Hendrix playing guitar and having him right in front of you. So I think he's probably right. This might be a new way to experience music that isn't a concert, that is a performance, but something else. He also snuck up behind a couple who were getting a demo at the Apple store in Hollywood. We're watching the concert and they took off the headset and there he is in person, which must have been kind of scary.
- [82:05]
Andy Ihnatko
I hope they can almost smell the bassist.
- [82:07]
Leo Laporte
I smell sight smell him. Yeah. So I think pretty cool.
- [82:14]
Andy Ihnatko
I mean, I've been totally with you, Alex. It's like I'm. I'm going to get a lot more excited about these kind of experiences once it makes that leap of like what smartphones did for video, where everybody has a video camera, everybody has nonlinear editing, everybody can shoot whatever they want to and develop their own style and basically serve whatever niche they want. Because, like, as we're talking about, like concert footage, I'm also thinking about the way that the Metropolitan Opera does their Met in HD broadcasts and the way that the number of times I've been, like, in the orchestra seats at the Met, and I usually have binoculars with me because that's a way. If you can't afford the $400 seats, you can basically upgrade your cheap, like, back of the house seats with binoculars. Because there are times where, like, I want to zoom in. I want to focus on, like, what this character is singing right now, or. Or even I want to see, like, what the choristers are doing in the background right now. And the ability to. If these kind of events, be it plays, be they concerts, be they opera, were recorded in this fashion where I'm just seated in the orchestra, there isn't, like, 100 camera angles. They're not choosing. They're not switching angles and switching shots, like, on the director's whim. But I have the ability to essentially keep looking around. I can change the focal length of what I'm looking at so that if I do want to see, like, there's some business going on in the background that I won't go into a long story, but one of my favorite moments of the Met was there's a scene in Agrippina where this action is happening, like, at the front of the stage. But there's a bar. It's happening in a bar, like, in the back of the stage. They're called super numeraries or actors. They're people who don't have non singing parts. Parts for. They got to hold this scene for, like, 15, 20 minutes. And they had almost this entire. You could tell during rehearsals they'd worked out this entire storyline of, okay, this guy is drunk off his butt, this other woman is, like, trying to. It thinks it's amazing that he got drunk so early. They're taking selfies with him. He doesn't know. And it's like, I'm so glad that Met in hd, of course, was focusing on the expensive tenor and the expensive soprano who were singing at the. At the front of the stage. But I was so loving this action happening in the back and the ability to simply focus on what catches your attention and what you really want to look at. That, I think is going to be transformative, and that's going to really increase my level of interest in this kind of presentation.
- [84:38]
Alex Lindsay
Well, and I. And I think that we, you know, we did some tests with the Ozos along a long time ago that could have been done in 180, which was, I think I've talked about before. We. We took a stage play and an off Broadway play, and we just put you where the best place to sit is for that scene. And so you just get. And. But every scene we would change where that was. And so you would just sit in the. You know, we would kind of. This is the place, the best place to be to watch this unfold. And we maybe moved it a little bit and it was the best play experience overhead. Like, just like I was, like, I could do this all the time, you know, like, because it's. It's still live. It has this feel like you're looking around, you're watching everybody. It's not a camera shot, but. But it's still happening. It feels like it's happening right in front of you. And that was at a much lower resolution and a much lower frame rate. So I'm excited.
- [85:23]
Andy Ihnatko
People are going to figure things out. I'm thinking about, like, that's that incredible shot in Rosemary's Base where the main character is like, can't quite see around a door because someone who's kind of doing something suspicious is making a phone call, but the door to the room is kind of half open. And if you see this in the movie theater when this scene happens, the entire audience goes. They're trying to see around the door.
- [85:50]
Alex Lindsay
Because it draws you there.
- [85:53]
Andy Ihnatko
That's the sort of stuff that I think is going to be pretty incredible once this stuff lands.
- [85:57]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one of the great things is, is that Apple is spending the kind of money it takes to do some of these shows so that we learn a lot. Like, I've. I've learned stuff watching every Apple event, every Apple release. These cost millions of dollars. Like, I don't know what I would have budgeted for that Metallica shoot. My budget would have been somewhere between two and three million dollars for. I don't know what Apple spent, but for that many cameras and what it takes to do those and the sky cams and the prep and, and the post and everything else, it would have been at least that much money. And so for Apple to take those chances and do those allow us to look at a bunch of things that some of us agree that they worked or didn't work, but it doesn't matter. We never had the budget to do that kind of thing. So Apple doing, you know, taking, you know, some of the hits here and being part, you know, showing us that stuff. And again, there's. In every Apple thing so far, every Apple release, I've seen a ton of things that I wouldn't do, do, but I've seen a couple things that I never thought would be possible that I go, oh, I'm definitely gonna, you know, so I think that that is exciting because they're, they are investing in things that we wouldn't, we wouldn't invest in otherwise, you know, that we wouldn't have the money to do without somebody because the, again, the market is small right now, but I think that it's going to be so I think it's going to be really interesting to see again. I think it's a really one of the most exciting video releases Apple has put out so far. Hoping to see another one soon.
- [87:18]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [87:19]
Alex Lindsay
More please.
- [87:20]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's your Vision Pro segment, everybody. Now you see, now you know.
- [87:25]
Jason Snell
We're done talking.
- [87:26]
Leo Laporte
The Vision Pro.
- [87:29]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [87:30]
Leo Laporte
Whiplash won and entered Sandman. That's, that's a, those are, that's three good classics pleaser.
- [87:38]
Andy Ihnatko
Sleep with one Eye open.
- [87:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Okay, let's take a break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Get it? We didn't know this when we played it. We didn't even have ads. But it turns out we have to take breaks. Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. Great to have all three of you here, listeners.
- [88:02]
E
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- [88:32]
Jason Snell
Hey prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news, with Amazon Music you have.
- [88:39]
E
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- [88:44]
Jason Snell
To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com ad free podcasts. That's Amazon.com ad free podcasts to catch.
- [88:54]
Andy Ihnatko
Up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [88:58]
Leo Laporte
Explain to me what is the theory behind Apple drop stopping its $23 million lawsuit against the recycler accused of stealing iPhones.
- [89:11]
Andy Ihnatko
The Theory so this was the kerfuffle that happened a few years ago where one of their recycles was found to be sort of holding onto certain recycled Apple watches. And a lot of these devices were deep Canada.
- [89:25]
Leo Laporte
They were Supposed to take them apart.
- [89:27]
Andy Ihnatko
Right, Exactly.
- [89:28]
Leo Laporte
Supposed to destroy them. About 100,000 devices did not get destroyed. Destroyed. They sold them on instead.
- [89:34]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And so there's a lot of stuff going on. So this week. So Apple sued this disassembler, but one day before the court was going to dismiss the suit anyway for lack of progress, Apple decided to withdraw it. And the theories that I've been seeing are that, number one, the discovery process on this would have been not very productive for Apple because they would have have had to talk about like what they do to phones, including the ones that they just simply destroy that could be recycled and sold on or given away or that's.
- [90:06]
Leo Laporte
That's. They don't want it revealed that they are not in fact recycling them. Yeah. And also doing it properly.
- [90:12]
Andy Ihnatko
Yes. And also someone who is. I'm afraid I don't have their name.
- [90:16]
Leo Laporte
But by the way, that is just. That is just a speculation.
- [90:19]
Andy Ihnatko
Exactly.
- [90:20]
Leo Laporte
Pure speculation. We don't.
- [90:21]
Andy Ihnatko
And another speculation from someone who is in that. In the industry of recycling basically said that the purpose of that lawsuit wasn't necessarily to win the lawsuit or to punish this company, but to put the fear of God into all the other companies that Apple does business with. That. Yeah. If you screw up, we will find out and we will make. We will end a very harmonious relationship in much the same way that multiple characters.
- [90:45]
Leo Laporte
Apple found out because auditors went to the facility, they found Apple watches being stored in a section that didn't have any security cameras. Geep actually admitted the accusations. It said, but it was a rogue employee and it then sued the rogue employee. So you know what, these kinds of things. This is complicated. I can see why it might not be anything suspicious. It might just be. This is a.
- [91:09]
Andy Ihnatko
Remember, every time we get something juicy about what goes on inside Apple, it's because they decided to fight a lawsuit. So.
- [91:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right.
- [91:16]
Andy Ihnatko
There's a sadness for all of us, but probably the right thing for Apple.
- [91:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they can be bad. Sonos. This is really not an Apple story, but I guess it's kind of peripheral to Apple has decided not to do the Pinewood streaming video player. This was going to be something to compete directly with. Apple TV was going to launch this year and it was going to do something that even Apple TV hasn't managed to do, which is kind of unify all the different streaming platforms into one easy to use interface. But Sonos probably wisely decided that maybe they should get their app working first.
- [91:49]
Alex Lindsay
I don't. I mean, I mean I don't even know what channel shows are on now. I just like hit the little thing on my Apple TV controller and say this show.
- [92:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that's why you never see any Netflix shows because it doesn't search Netflix as we talked about that. Yeah.
- [92:08]
Jason Snell
This is a kind of move you do as a company when there are no other worlds to conquer. You finally control the entire premium audio digital space. Really. People want your hardware, they're paying a premium. You make huge profits. What could we do next? Let's do a video player too, right? And I know so many people who use Sonos speakers with other video players or with their televisions directly that it makes sense in that scenario. But as we all know, a year ago Sonos, you know, took a header, you know, stepped in a thousand rakes and is still reeling from that. They lost, lost their executives as a part of it. And like, so this move is great to me because it was a, it was a move from another era. And the people who made that decision are gone because they blew it when it comes to their core product category. And you got to get right by your existing customers if you possibly can before you try to step out. But, but like I don't think this necessarily in a logical move if Sonos was that the top, but they fell apart.
- [93:16]
Alex Lindsay
So I mean as someone who has, who has 14 semi working amps from Sonos that I, I just don't know how they get back on. Like the idea of, I mean, I just see the logo when I get upset. I know, you know, and so that's the hard part. I think that's the challenge for them is they really, they really torch this one, you know, like that's the shame, you know. Yeah, yeah.
- [93:40]
Andy Ihnatko
There was some other news I thought was positive for Apple tv. So apparently Roku is test a new thing where whenever you go back to the home screen it will autoplay like an ad first. And just some people on Reddit have reported, hey, we saw this reach out for comment. Roku said, oh, we're testing lots of things to aid in discovery products and partnerships and blah, blah. And it just, that's the first time it really occurred to me that, wow, Apple TV will never do that to you. Never will do that to you. And although I do complain that, oh God, I wish they had like a $30 something to compare with like Chromecast with Google TV which is a really nice 4K streamer dongle that costs like 30, $40. I don't know, Google doesn't do that. But I don't know that they will never do that. But whereas it would be worth spending lots of extra dollars on an Apple TV box that doesn't necessarily do a whole lot more than Google TV or Roku. If I knew that I will never be forced to see a pre roll ad just because I was stupid enough to pick up my remote and try to launch Netflix.
- [94:48]
Leo Laporte
There is a rumor that there will be a new Apple TV this year. Is that credible? You think I would buy an. I mean I'll upgrade. I don't. I know it's expensive, but it is our sole way of watching TV now because we, we're all.
- [95:02]
Alex Lindsay
It's my only interface to the tv. I just have an Apple TV connected to the TV and the TV is just a monitor like all this.
- [95:08]
Leo Laporte
Well, I wish it were smart TV with all that crap on it.
- [95:12]
Alex Lindsay
I have a smart. The TV is capable of more but I just treat it like a monitor. It's not allowed to touch at the end.
- [95:16]
Leo Laporte
I wish Samsung would let you take all that stuff off but it pops up anyway. So anybody, have you heard? Jason New Apple TV is that credible?
- [95:27]
Jason Snell
I don't, I mean anything's possible that's on a long cycle. I don't feel like there's any need in terms of the hardware. The only reason they might do it is if there's a particular video spec, a high end spec that they want to support or I think the most likely is if the chips that are currently in the model they're making are, you know, being put to the end of their life and they need to do a chip refresh just to get on a more modern process. But like it is. I haven't read my story yet but I bought a bunch of streamer boxes the other month after Mark Gurman talked about the Apple TV being a laggard. And you know, there's no, it's, there's no competition. There are some other streamer boxes that are, that feel roughly as fast as the Apple tv. Roughly. But there's nothing. I mean there's lots of software work they need to do, but it's not software. It's fine.
- [96:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's closer to perfect than anything else. And I have an Nvidia Shield which is probably the closest competition and I like it. But it's. Apple TV's always the winner.
- [96:25]
Alex Lindsay
I mean where Apple could. I mean I think that technically the current Apple TV would do this as well or is capable of it. It is technically the spec for the HDMI will support 4K 120 frames per second, which really makes a difference for lives like sports. Now, the problem is that the pipeline to deliver 4K120 is really hard. So ask me how I know. So anyway, so 120 frame 4k120 is a difficult thing to deliver, but that's the kind of thing Apple could take on because they have like, let's say, ML mls. If Apple a year from now or, or two or, you know, this year, next year suddenly started dumping MLS at, as a test at 120 frames per second or other, or MLB or whatever, it puts an incredible amount of pressure on everybody else because it's really hard.
- [97:14]
Leo Laporte
What.
- [97:14]
Alex Lindsay
This is what Apple's good at. It's really hard to do. You need control of the entire pipeline. And that's what they have, you know, and they could force everybody into a. Into a brier patch that would be very, very difficult for everyone else to manage.
- [97:26]
Andy Ihnatko
I just wish that they would do something like you like. Leo, you mentioned the, the N Shield, which is my streaming box. And one of my favorite features of it is the simple fact that when I'm. I don't have like gigabit Internet at my house and I'm not sure if I would pay extra to a streaming service to have 4k streaming, but I can, I can get a 1080 stream and it will automatically upscale it to 4k built in.
- [97:50]
Leo Laporte
Upscaling. It's quite.
- [97:51]
Andy Ihnatko
And it's really, really good. And those. That's the sort of stuff that makes me think, okay, there's a reason, a reason why I didn't buy the 30 or 40 or there's a reason why the $40 dongle is on the bedroom TV and the $150 thing is on the nice living room TV. And that's the sort of stuff I want to see from Apple.
- [98:07]
Leo Laporte
The Google TV interface, not great. Or Android. Is it Android or Google? I can't remember.
- [98:11]
Andy Ihnatko
It is Android tv.
- [98:12]
Leo Laporte
It's Android. It's not great. It's better than Fire tv, which talk about ads. It's unusable.
- [98:18]
Jason Snell
It's terrible. And then the Roku is just the most generous, generic, like totally generic. It's fine, but it's super generic. It's very clearly, even though you can buy a Roku box, their whole strategy really is let's be as generic as possible. So we can be put in TVs and it is super generic. Amazon, actually, the Fire TV functionally, in terms of its feature set, is actually pretty Great. But you can't use it because it's just an ad delivery medium. And like I literally set mine up. I don't know if I told you the story, but I set mine up to test it. And the first thing I did, I got to the home screen, literally the home screen. And it sat there for about 10 seconds and it began playing an A commercial, not even a promo for something on the box. Literally a commercial for a business in my area. And I thought what are we even doing here? Like why? Like I just wanted to rip it off my TV immediately because like that, that's Amazon. Amazon just wants to sell you stuff. Even if you buy their high end streamer box. Doesn't matter. You're just going to get ads everywhere. And like if, if you don't care, I guess that's great. But it's a shame because it's actually not a bad interface otherwise. And it has some things that it does that Apple doesn't do. But.
- [99:28]
Alex Lindsay
Oh well, it's, it's a really interesting. I find advertising to be interesting because like my family is completely shielded from it at this point. Like I don't like. And I realized how little and it's a problem for like the theatrical releases and all kinds of other things is that there's a, there's a big chunk of the population now that is basically opting out. You know, where I just don't see, you know, I pay for YouTube Premium and I have a bunch of streaming services that don't have the ads in them. And, and I just don't know what movies are coming out. I don't know what the new thing is because I just don't see that on repeat, repeat all the time. And my kids have kind of grown up without it ever. So they don't know. Like they, I think when premium dropped off because my credit card changed away, whatever to a new card or whatever the, they were like who lives? Like, like my, my, my kids had never, like they were like 14 years old and never seen, you know, more than a couple ads against each other ever. And, and I think so I think it's really interesting to see like what pockets of the, of the viewing public are completely just cutting out of being able to see because now we don't, we don't get magazines, we don't get, you know, like we listen to audiobooks, we listen to, you know, like there's so many places where we subscription has replaced, replaced, you know, all of the content and it's just a, it's A I I don't know how that impacts all of these things, but it is interesting that I I because I can't go back. I can't go watching ads and like interruptions that are ads. If, if like YouTube TV stopped allowing me to fast forward through the ads, I probably just quit.
- [100:56]
Leo Laporte
We can't talk about it. We don't know what's going on. But the, but the Brits are having a secret court hearing on icloud encryption. Everybody and their brother, all the media are saying you can't, you shouldn't be, it should be public. But of course, this is kind of like our secret FISA courts. The BBC has asked that they make it available. Reuters, Financial Times, the Guardian, even members of Congress who don't have a lot of clout anymore in the UK government. But Ron Wyden and Andy Biggs and Alex Potential Padilla and Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren have all asked the UK let us know what's going on in this trial. But the UK says no. And Apple's not allowed to talk about it. In fact, Apple was very clever because they never did admit that the UK government demanded that they break icloud encryption. They just stopped allowing UK citizens to install adp. That was a sufficient connection to let us know that they weren't going to go along. Now, they may be ordered in some way. We don't know what this court hearing is all about, but maybe they'll find a way to let us know secretly.
- [102:13]
Andy Ihnatko
I see no reality in which Apple is forced to at least temporarily allow backdoor access to every icloud customer in the entire world without in some way informing the entire world that do not trust encryption or we have to turn it off for everybody. We can't say why they would much rather, I mean, there's no downside to them. And I also believe that they are virulently offended to the idea of breaking down security and privacy. For those who want that extra layer.
- [102:40]
Leo Laporte
Of privacy, there is good news though. If you are in other countries, Apple has rolled out tap to pay in Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Lichtenstein. Am I saying that right? Lichtenstein. Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia. Oh, they're different countries. Okay. Switzerland. I'm being silly. Sorry. Now are all offering tap to pay. That is the feature where you can use your iPhone as a payment terminal. You don't have to buy a fancy square terminal or anything. You just tap the iPhones together and they may work so well. Have a little baby.
- [103:18]
Alex Lindsay
I use it. I go to the. I'm Often at the San Rafael Farmer's Market on.
- [103:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's perfect for farmer's markets and.
- [103:27]
Alex Lindsay
Where I get this breakfast burrito. It's kind of like my little, you know, thing to get there. And, and the woman that's there, she's all, she has an iPhone. She just reaches out and it's like so cool. And it's just like, it's magic.
- [103:37]
Leo Laporte
It does that little thing on the screen and the money, money flows and.
- [103:45]
Alex Lindsay
Then you go to the next stall and it's like, cash only.
- [103:47]
Leo Laporte
And you're like, oh God, I got no cash, man. You want cash for.
- [103:53]
Alex Lindsay
Exactly.
- [103:54]
Leo Laporte
Apple is working on multiple versions of a second generation studio display. It's funny, we mocked the studio display because it was so expensive for what you get. And yet I bought one for Lisa.
- [104:04]
Jason Snell
I bought two.
- [104:05]
Leo Laporte
Everybody's got them because it just works. It's got a camera in it. It's just easy. I hope they find a way to make it less expensive. That would be nice.
- [104:15]
Alex Lindsay
It's pretty good for what it does. It's a pretty good deal compared to. There's not a lot of other things. The reason that Apple's selling them and reason people buy them is for what it does. There's not a lot of other. They had to make it because in that price point you don't see a lot of other.
- [104:30]
Jason Snell
There are now multiple screens that are in that are a lot like the set. Like Samsung makes one and it's not as good, but it's been discounted at a point now where it is appreciably less than this.
- [104:41]
Leo Laporte
But it took a while, right, for.
- [104:43]
Jason Snell
The studio and you know, Apple doesn't cut their prices over time. So it's just sitting there until they update it. It would be great, right? Like they could do a higher frame rate version or, you know, better screen refresh promotion. They could improve that camera which, you know, they've upgraded the cameras and all of the products they've shipped in the last year. So that there's probably something they could do there. You know, it could, they could do. It would be a good time to do one. But yeah, again the studio display, even though it's expensive and it now has more competition, there's that other part of it which, which is. And I feel the same way, presumably Alex would about that Samsung display is. I got one, I tried it out and if I could save, you know, $700 or something, then yeah, let's talk. But it's gonna be a worse experience. It just is cheap and it's got all of the Samsung apps loaded on it. So it kind of wants to be a TV and you have to sort of tell it no, stop trying to be a TV and like it's not as nice. And so you know, Apple having a monitor that's more expensive than others but, but it's nice. That's where Apple wants to be.
- [105:49]
Leo Laporte
Speaking of encryption, Apple has said we are soon going to add support for end to end encryption in RCS messaging. That is when you are messaging somebody on an Android device. Right now Android users have encryption end to end if they're talking to each other.
- [106:06]
Alex Lindsay
Well I think Apple's following the spec, right?
- [106:08]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly. GSM basically upgraded now after many years of work have upgraded their spec to include an A specification for end to end encryption. This is what Apple has always said that they don't want to, they don't want to put in all the work to support Google's end to end encryption spec. They would much rather wait for the GSM to approve an end to end encryption spec and then support that. So that's what they're doing. And both Apple and Google have said that yeah, we're all, we're going to be supporting this end end encryption spec all the way.
- [106:36]
Leo Laporte
No specific timeline but maybe in the next version of iOS or maybe even in a 18 point release.
- [106:42]
Andy Ihnatko
They're busy, they're busy.
- [106:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [106:44]
Andy Ihnatko
The question, the question is are they going to hang on to the green bubbles because remember all they were always saying, oh, we want to warn people that part of their chat is not being encrypted. So okay, great, it's now end to end encrypted. Are you going to stop shaming phones?
- [107:00]
Jason Snell
They won't be blue because they're not imessage but I do think they need to signify that they're encrypted. Right. So is it a new icon, is it a new color or something like that? But I would say they're not going to be blue because they're not imessage.
- [107:11]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and also again one of those tidbits we found out because of a lawsuit that they really do believe that they don't want to give people an excuse to give their kids cheaper Android phones and they are disincentivized from basically making the interoperability as seamless as possible. So kicking and screaming I think will be the modus.
- [107:34]
Jason Snell
Except I mean honestly at this point the difference will be color because if you're an encrypted rc, I don't know if you've noticed this, Andy, but the interplay between iOS and Android for messaging in the last year has gotten a lot better. Like the tap backs and like all that stuff is sort of working fine now in a way that it wasn't before. So the pain is a lot less if you're in heterogeneous set of communicators, it's okay. And then adding in the encryption will just make it even less of an issue.
- [108:04]
Andy Ihnatko
And remember that the we don't know why Apple suddenly decided to to start supporting rcs, but the rumor is that they had to. They were forced to do so to comply with rules in China. So this is. I don't think that regulation and government control of technology is always a great thing, but it is a good thing to sometimes have a government say, yeah, no, you're doing it this way because this is, this is the best way for all of our citizens.
- [108:25]
Leo Laporte
Actor Pedro Pascal is super hot right now after his success with Last of Us. He's a great actor and I don't know how much actor Apple paid for a 5 minute spike Jones directed commercial for AirPods 4, but I do know he's not acting when he says those AirPods just make him feel so much better. Here he is walking sadly down the you can show this. They're not gonna dig us for this. I'm not gonna play the sound.
- [108:53]
Andy Ihnatko
And this isn't a cameo. This is a shot of him for the entire five minute video. He's the star.
- [108:58]
Leo Laporte
He's walking down the the street very, very disconsolate because I gather his girlfriend doesn't like him anymore.
- [109:05]
Andy Ihnatko
Only look he was looking the opening shot is him looking mournfully at a woman sitting at a table who looks back at him. We're.
- [109:11]
Leo Laporte
And now we don't know what.
- [109:12]
Andy Ihnatko
He's basically walking through the 1984 video.
- [109:16]
Leo Laporte
It's grim, it's great, and everybody's sad, but he's got his AirPods in and they're dancing and then he turns, then.
- [109:23]
Andy Ihnatko
He turns on the noise kit. They basically I want to be inside my own head and everything turns colorful and bright. And oh look across the street there's another version of him that's meeting friends and making dinner plans and happy and he can start dancing in a palette of oranges and reds. It's a great, it's a great one. Like you were talking about her like it was Spike.
- [109:45]
Leo Laporte
Is this going to be cut down into a 30 and a 60 for TV or is it just totally. Yeah, I don't know.
- [109:51]
Andy Ihnatko
I mean, there's no messaging. There's no. What, like thanks. Well, thanks to the noise cancellation, I can stop listening to this person who's asking for me directions and enjoy life. It's like, no, it's actually a very nice, lovely little five minute film.
- [110:04]
Leo Laporte
It is, yeah. Spike Jones directed. So this must have cost him.
- [110:08]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [110:08]
Leo Laporte
Millions and millions.
- [110:10]
Andy Ihnatko
Real short movie. This could. A real movie. It's not promo.
- [110:14]
Leo Laporte
Doesn't say shot on iPhone, but I bet it was. I don't know.
- [110:17]
Andy Ihnatko
I'd be shocked.
- [110:18]
Alex Lindsay
And if it was. There's a whole bunch of behind the scenes. There's a whole bunch of, you know.
- [110:21]
Leo Laporte
Like there will be. There'll be more. More, right? Could be, yeah. And there's Santa Claus as a construction worker. That's cool. It's really cool. It's really nicely done. Maybe Pedro was inspired by the artistic vision and said, I'll do it for free. I don't know.
- [110:36]
Andy Ihnatko
That's why you hire Spike Jones. It's like, oh, wow. So we're really making a little movie. We're not just doing a commercial. That's like, in that case I will. You hire directors because directors attract actors and sometimes vice versa. So. And this is beautiful stuff.
- [110:53]
Alex Lindsay
Then it's, you know, it's, it's. And it's a, it's interesting four by three format. So it's. So that, that's an interesting choice in, in, in building that out too. Pitch would look good on an IMAX screen. But, but the. It is, it is an interesting, you know, a whole bunch of set of choices. But yeah, for, for directors and actors. A lot of times these corporate things, especially when they're given a lot of creative control, like, hey, we'll give you a bunch of money and then we'll give you a huge budget and you can just go out and play. What do you want to do?
- [111:25]
Leo Laporte
That sounds great.
- [111:26]
Alex Lindsay
You can often get somebody to show up and do something when you do that.
- [111:29]
Leo Laporte
Probably bought him another house in Beverly Hills. Last story before we get to our picks of the week. Eric Migovsky writing on his pebble blog, not too happy with Apple as you know. I think today the new Pebble Watch comes. Comes out soon anyway.
- [111:46]
Andy Ihnatko
Two models pre order start now. First version ships in July. Second version, the one that's basically a redo of the last Pebble Watch ships in July with a polycarbonate case and monochrome display. There's a color one with additional heart rate monitor with a metal case and a larger screen that ships in December 150 and 250.
- [112:05]
Leo Laporte
I suspect there's some iPhone users who would like to use it. But Eric says Apple restricts pebble from being awesome with iPhones. Yep, should get him some noise canceling AirPods. We all we will build a good app for iOS but be prepared. There's no way for us to support all the functionality Apple Watch has access to. Not because they couldn't, but because Apple, Apple won't let them.
- [112:28]
Andy Ihnatko
He says it's impossible for a third party smartwatch to send text messages or perform actions on notifications like dismissing muting, replying and many, many other things.
- [112:36]
Leo Laporte
Security, don't you know.
- [112:38]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [112:39]
Leo Laporte
To protect you.
- [112:40]
Andy Ihnatko
They just want to make sure that their customers have the best. Yeah, exactly. After they've run out of things to sue Apple for for the App Store, I think that the next thing that they're going to do is about. It really is kind of lame that they're not allowing functionality between iPhones and third party watches. That does seem like we don't want to encourage people to buy a third party watch. We want to lock them further into the ecosystem.
- [113:07]
Leo Laporte
By the way, the pebble, the repebble website is just fantastic. Eight years later, you still can't beat a Pebble. And There's a gravestone 2012-2016 and then a hand pops out of the grave.
- [113:19]
Andy Ihnatko
Sierra Online game.
- [113:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's eight bit.
- [113:23]
Andy Ihnatko
The blog post is monospace text.
- [113:26]
Leo Laporte
I love it. It looks like a markdown edit back in the time. I'm tempted. I must say. I'm really tempted.
- [113:32]
Andy Ihnatko
I really am too because I, I mean I think I mentioned before that like I stopped wearing like both my, my Pixel watch and my Apple watch because I just, I wasn't getting enough use out of like the super super features and it wasn't enough to justify having to remember to charge it each and every night.
- [113:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, 30 day, 30 day. Because it's a E Ink screen. 30 day, 30 days.
- [113:53]
Andy Ihnatko
And also that's, that's the thing that they're making a big point of that this is not necessarily that people might be surprised, like wow. But the last pebble watch was nearly 10 years ago. Why they essentially realized remaking the old one because we didn't feel like anything was wrong with the old one. There's a space for something that is not quite a $25 Casio watch, but is not necessarily a $400 smartwatch either.
- [114:17]
Leo Laporte
Does it work better with Android than it does with an iPhone? It must, right?
- [114:20]
Jason Snell
It must.
- [114:21]
Andy Ihnatko
It must.
- [114:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [114:22]
Andy Ihnatko
I'm sure that you can on third party Android phones, you can like react to notifications.
- [114:28]
Leo Laporte
There's two things you can do on your Pixel that you can't do on an iPhone. Artificial intelligence and a Pebble Watch.
- [114:34]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but yeah, 30, 30 days using 30 day charge on this is enough to make me think I have $250. I'm going to make another $250 better.
- [114:45]
Leo Laporte
Than an Android Wear watch would be.
- [114:46]
Andy Ihnatko
Or I don't know of any Android Wear watch that does that. Again, if my problem is I don't want to have to remember to recharge it every day or every two days.
- [114:56]
Leo Laporte
And it still has a heart rate monitor, it has a Compass.
- [114:59]
Andy Ihnatko
The $250 one has the addition of a heart rate monitor, but they both have step counters because that is, I mean the thing is that the value add for every Apple Watch is of course all the health features. It's like it's not as though Android wear watches, especially at the top tier aren't good.
- [115:16]
Leo Laporte
This is definitely for the Casio crowd. I mean, let's be honest. I agree.
- [115:21]
Andy Ihnatko
Like he's also saying all 10,000 exist. Existing Pebble OS apps are going to continue to work with it.
- [115:28]
Leo Laporte
That's amazing.
- [115:28]
Andy Ihnatko
It's probably going to spur development. I'm imagining it like if you're familiar with the Notes app, Obsidian, the difference between Obsidian and Ulysses, that's the difference between this watch and an Apple Watch where Obsidian is objectively more open, has an immense amount of plugins, you can customize it exactly the way you want, but it is kind of a Fiddler's text editor. Whereas you see Ulysses out of the box, it does what you want it to do. Apple Watch, I think a Pebble Watch, the stuff that you're going to really, the stuff that you like about it will come out of the box. If it's like what I remember pebble being the stuff that you love about it will be after you do a bunch of fiddling. But that said, I am also very, very jazzed about push buttons to scroll through the interface because sometimes you just don't have access to like bare skin and it doesn't need it for what it wants to do.
- [116:17]
Jason Snell
So I wore a Pebble for a couple of years before the Apple Watch came out and I liked a lot of things about it. If you are somebody who doesn't use a smartwatch for fitness or anything and all you really want is time and notifications, people would always ask me like, ah, how do you like that Pebble? My response Was always tells the time. Right? It's a watch. And then also it put my notifications from my phone on my wrist so I could see them there and I thought that was cool. And you know there is something to be said for that. Like not everybody needs a fitness watch. They don't.
- [116:52]
Leo Laporte
Well, my watch says it's time to take a break and get ready for your picks of the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason. I know. It's something I look forward to every Tuesday. I hope you do too. We stream it live so you can watch it get the first edition. If you're in the club, you can watch it in our club Twit Discord. Discord. But you can also watch on YouTube and Twitch and X.com and then TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook and Kick and it's nice to watch live. But our club members get a little something extra. They also get to chat live. Well, actually you all get to do that too. Club members get ad free versions of all the shows. How about that? You also get access to the club Twit Discord where the chatting happens all the time, which is a lot of fun. We're going to I Mark Prince contacted me. We're going to do a really fun coffee klatch soon. We'd like to talk about coffee. Micah's creative corners. Coming up in the club we have Stacy's book club. Let's see Micah's crafting corners tomorrow, 6pm Pacific. Every third Wednesday of the month so you can craft along with Micah. He's building some tiny little thing. I forgot the user group again. But oh no, I didn't. It's coming up March 28th. It's the fourth Friday I missed the first AI user group. But I'm very excited about this. We get together, we show each other how we're using AI. This is a lot of fun. Chris markowartz photo time April 3rd. Brilliant is the word and more to come. I want to have some more events in the club so there's a lot of benefits and guess what? All of this, seven smackers a month. Seven bucks a month. That's a very affordable club for all the shows, ad free versions, the behind the scenes stuff. Twit TV club Twit. But the real reason I want to encourage you to do it, it makes a big difference to us. It doesn't go into my pocket, but it keeps the shows on the air. It goes into our host's pockets, our employees pockets. It goes into the electric company's pockets. It keeps things going and it means it's possible to do more. And that really means a lot to us. I love our club members. I'm so grateful to you. In fact, I would want to encourage everybody. Our 20th anniversary twit is coming up on April 13, less than a month away and we want to get everybody involved. Last time when we did the thousandth episode, we got all the old guys, you know, who were on the first episode together for TWiT. But this time I really want to honor the community. If you've been watching for a long time, I'd love to get a video from you. I got an email from a prisoner saying how, you know, he was very grateful because he can listen to Twit in prison. They allow it through because it's safe content and he said it's kind of keeping him sane in there. So there's just I'd love to hear from everybody who's listening. It's nice for us to know. If you want to send us a video showing us how you watch or listen and when you first discover twit, that kind of thing, just email it to me leoloville.com or put it on the socials and make sure it is in there and we will start start playing them. Scooter X says, but wait, it's during Coachella. I won't be. You're going to Coachella instead of being here for our 20th anniversary. Scooter X. People were saying. People were saying that Scooter X should be featured. He's been with us for so long as a chat mod for many years and now as a club member. Anyway, we'd love to get that for April 30th. Record something for us and you can be part of the 20th anniversary show.
- [120:34]
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- [121:05]
Leo Laporte
All right, let's get our picks of the week going here. Jason Snell, what do you Got.
- [121:09]
Jason Snell
All right. I am going in my endless quest to find a good outdoor homekit capable security camera. I have come to the Akara G5 Pro which costs 180 bucks. It's available all over the place. It comes in a WI fi version. For a little bit more you get a power over ethernet version. It is rugged, it is sturdy, it looks pretty good. It's got a spotlight. It is very high video quality. I'm very impressed with it. If you use the Akara app instead of using it through HomeKit, you get a whole bunch of other kind of machine learning features about like identifying people who are lingering around your door or whatever. Like they're things. Or you can just use it with HomeKit. It works with HomeKit Secure Video. It's very hard to find a good key camera that works with HomeKit Secure Video. And it's got a bunch of other nerdy features that are kind of amazing. It is a zigbee hub. It is a thread hub. It is a matter controller.
- [122:04]
Andy Ihnatko
Wow.
- [122:05]
Jason Snell
It works with not just HomeKit but of course Alexa, Google Home Home Assistant, you name it. Because it's a hub as well as a camera and it's got internal storage that it can save to also right out of the box box. It can write video to a NAS or any other like SMB share on your network. So I was able to just put in my server and it will stream video to the server in addition to HomeKit like there are lots and lots of features. It is really. They threw everything at this thing. It is chunky, it's a chunky boy. But I'm very impressed with it so far. I'm going to permanently be mounting it in fact, because I think it is thus far the winner of the sweepstakes of can I get an outdoor camera that actually works with home?
- [122:56]
Leo Laporte
You know, I like there are a lot of choices and some of them, like the ring cameras upload to the cloud. And because I am broadcasting streaming from here, we can't use upstream bandwidth.
- [123:08]
Jason Snell
Fills your Internet. Yeah.
- [123:10]
Leo Laporte
So those are the kinds of cameras we use, ubiquiti cameras. But that's a really important consideration. It's going to use up your Internet bandwidth if you're uploading. So something like this, a car that doesn't. You can still look at it on your phone and stuff.
- [123:25]
Jason Snell
Well, and it works with the HomeKit Secure Video. So it will upload to the cloud if you wanted to, but you can also just have it store locally or on your network and it'll do that too. It really is sort of like an all purpose device. Whatever your home platform of choice is, it'll work with it which is great. Now Akara, you know their app is not very good. It's very clearly, you know they pay more attention to industrial design of their hardware than they do to their app design. But again if you're living in the HomeKit ecosystem it doesn't matter because you just pair it and you're done. And again for the nerdy people out there, there is a power over ethernet version too. So then you've got ethernet attached so it doesn't have to sit on your wi fi and you have to deal with reliability issues with wi fi and it is also going to be that zigbee thread matter hub as well. So a lot of cool things about it.
- [124:17]
Leo Laporte
For the ubiquiti I actually have a hard drive array of you know, massive hard drive array to record. How could you do that with HomeKit could you have a local hard drive array that you record to or home?
- [124:29]
Jason Snell
HomeKit Secure Video is a cloud thing and uses Apple surfers so you just need a camera that will record. So in this case I literally put in my SMB credentials and it will stream video right to my local my RAID on my network.
- [124:41]
Leo Laporte
Good, because that's what I need. I don't mind putting it on the LAN but I don't want to have to upload it to cloud because it'd.
- [124:46]
Jason Snell
Kill our and it's got, I should say it's got 6 gigs of internal storage so it will write that stuff internally as well until it runs out and then it'll just keep deleting.
- [124:55]
Leo Laporte
The reason I don't want to leave it internal is because if somebody comes along and wants to rob me, he's going to kill the camera and take it with him and then he's maybe so yeah, I like having it recording somewhere else just in case. I hear you, you know what I'm saying? I'm not paranoid. I never really wanted to have cameras all over the house but here we are and it is useful. I just saw the UPS guy deliver so you know Andy and Iko pick.
- [125:22]
Andy Ihnatko
Of the week Now I don't mean to kick Apple when they're down regarding AI but I have been having so much fun with the new version of Google Gemini Flash 2.0. They For 20 bucks a month you get like extra AI features but you also get access to the experimental versions. Like that's not ready yet but there's ready yet for developer start messing around with It.
- [125:47]
Leo Laporte
So you took this image.
- [125:49]
Andy Ihnatko
So I took this. I basically during the show, I took just a selfie of myself, my webcam.
- [125:53]
Leo Laporte
This Red Sox jersey.
- [125:55]
Andy Ihnatko
So I just dragged into the chat window. That's picture of myself as you're seeing me right now. Just a stock photo of a Red Sox jersey from a, from a store shop. Stock photo of like a Red Sox hat from a, from a store shelf. And simply said, put this, put the Red Sox shirt and hat on the wall.
- [126:12]
Leo Laporte
You look a lot like the babe, actually.
- [126:15]
Andy Ihnatko
Thank you.
- [126:15]
Leo Laporte
I.
- [126:16]
Andy Ihnatko
Without the womanizing, but I do a lot of the same drinking and staying up all night and just the ability to simply describe what you want done with this. Like, I don't. I want the background. I want. I want the person in the foreground to take off the headphones or remove the microphone. It can also do stories like, you can even do things like not only make up a. Here's. I want you to make up a story about the magic pebble watch that's being abused by the ogre apple into like not being able to speak and help the townspeople. So generate 400 word children's story. And I want you to illustrate it in this, in the, in the style of like a watercolor children's book illustrator. And it will like, illustrate the story as it goes. And if it does, if it doesn't do terribly well, you can simply say, okay, try that again. But I want the stories, I want the color palette to be a little more blues and greens instead of like blacks and oranges. And again, this is experimental. If you were to zoom in on that picture, you see, that's kind of. It's very, very fuzzy because again, I'm not paying like TPU units for it to create like a super high resolution version.
- [127:23]
Leo Laporte
Oh, but you could.
- [127:26]
Andy Ihnatko
Again, I don't know if you can do that with experimental, but when it gets released like we were talking about earlier, Google's whole point is not only to create features for phones. So maybe a future version of the Google Photos app will let you describe what you want to change. It'll change it.
- [127:41]
Leo Laporte
It is recognizably you though. That's it is.
- [127:44]
Andy Ihnatko
It didn't change the face. And another thing, I did one test where I had created a standup routine about paper airplanes is the first thing came to my head. And I want you to show me. Imagine that's being shot on video and the standup comedian is on stage at a small comedy club telling the story and give me frame grabs as he's Telling this story and it generates all these images and the character is. The person is the same person picture after picture after picture. And when I say things like I want this and have him getting, have. Have him get increasingly angry as he tells the story and end the joke by tearing up. They decided that he. The the image generator decided he should be holding a paper airplane. So okay, so I want you to end the joke with him tearing up the paper airplane and throwing it on the floor and it regenerated it and it was the exact same character. So that in itself is something that you is not an automatic thing in image generation where it's like don't change the person. Make sure it's the same person as you make the these changes that I'm talking about. It's a lot of fun and really is a good peek into like what photo editing and what a lot of creation is going to be like in the hopefully not too distant future. And the sort of and does give you a peer into this when I'm talking about Apple doesn't necessarily have to have amazing AI features on every phone immediately but in a couple years time when you have the ability to say not just use like hand editing on your photo editor when simply say I want the third person on the left to be at the very, very end and I want the second person to the right to be gone completely and move it together so you can't see that someone's been removed and just like say that to a personal system and it just happens. That is going to be one of those moments I keep talking about of why can't my phone do that? Because it's very, very applicable to what a lot of people do. So it's a lot fun to play with.
- [129:35]
Leo Laporte
I got my Pixel 9 over here. I'm going to have to start messing with it. Very interesting. Yeah. Thank you Andrew. Andy, by the way, we don't mention it enough Hosts a show about Android called Material with Florence Ion.
- [129:51]
Andy Ihnatko
Yep, all about Google. So you think that we talk a lot about lawsuits and antitrust on this show. Oh boy. I have to oftentimes like say okay how of the lesson three weeks have we actually not stopped talking about them being sued into oblivion by the Department of Justice or somebody else. So it's fun. Google infests and impresses all of our lives in every way. Which means that there's a lot of scary things to talk about, a lot of great things to talk about. It's a lot of fun. It's on the Relay network.
- [130:23]
Leo Laporte
Relay fm. All right. I might actually buy this. It's only a tenth of an. Alex. Alex Lindy, your pick of the week.
- [130:34]
Alex Lindsay
Friend of mine, Chris Fenwick sent. Sent me a picture of this and within a minute I owned it. Like. Like it was on its way. I was like. I was just so.
- [130:40]
Leo Laporte
So this.
- [130:41]
Alex Lindsay
This is it.
- [130:42]
Leo Laporte
Look at it. Look at this little guy. It's a Mac Mini case into a case. It. Everything turns it into a cheese grater.
- [130:49]
Alex Lindsay
And I, I fill up all these ports and so, so I.
- [130:52]
Leo Laporte
It works with all the ports and everything and works with all the ports.
- [130:56]
Alex Lindsay
It's actually build quality. Now I. This. There's about three or four of these. I will admit this is probably the more expensive one at. But the build quality is good. It's got a nice little. The power button now is again on the side because it's. It sits up like this and it's. It's good build quality as far as that goes. And it. Yeah, it fits quite nicely. It looks very nice on a desk. My son has been using this to do some DaVinci resolve work. And so, so he. It's like this little power machine on the side of it. I. It's completely absurd. Completely not needed and so much fun, you know.
- [131:33]
Leo Laporte
You know why I'm thinking of getting it? Because I get one of my speakers are too close to my Mac Mini. I get a little buzz and I'm thinking this might shield it a little bit better. You think?
- [131:44]
Alex Lindsay
It could. It could.
- [131:46]
Leo Laporte
It's aluminum, right?
- [131:47]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's. It's heavy. Like, this is not like a. Like a little plastic thing. This is machined. I want it again. There's some other ones that are probably a little lighter weight than this one. This one, really, you feel like you. You bought something that is going to protect it, I guess. I don't know if it needs protecting, but. But anyway, it was just. It was just too much fun not to. Not to get it.
- [132:08]
Andy Ihnatko
So I really, really hope. I would not blame them. I would encourage them to create an optional set of wheels that cost like $180 for the set.
- [132:19]
Alex Lindsay
That would be great.
- [132:21]
Leo Laporte
All right. It's. It's. It's on Amazon.
- [132:23]
Alex Lindsay
So I mean I'm sure some chap.
- [132:26]
Leo Laporte
It's some Chinese company.
- [132:27]
Alex Lindsay
Chinese company that. But it's a super fun little.
- [132:33]
Leo Laporte
We'll put a link in the show notes so you can go right to it or you can search for aluminum chassis. Stand for 2024 Mac mini M4. M4 Pro Mac mini M4 stand Mac mini M4 case optimize heat distribution. Accessories for Mac. Mini M4 Mac. Mini M4 Mount Mac mini M4 holder brand Tiga.
- [132:50]
Alex Lindsay
Very SEO oriented.
- [132:52]
Leo Laporte
All of it. You know, this is something new though. I never saw this before on Amazon. Shorter shipping distance. This item ships from a warehouse that's closer than average to you. So it would emit less carbon if I bought it. So I'm going to buy it. I mean.
- [133:07]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, there you go.
- [133:07]
Leo Laporte
It's good for the environment.
- [133:09]
Alex Lindsay
It's coming straight to you from what? American Valley or what is the American. That's where the big warehouse is.
- [133:13]
Leo Laporte
They probably bought, when they saw Alex bought one, they probably bought 10 more and put them in the warehouse.
- [133:18]
Alex Lindsay
Man, we got to get some American Canyon. That's the one.
- [133:21]
Leo Laporte
American Canyon, Yeah.
- [133:22]
Alex Lindsay
That's the big warehouse.
- [133:23]
Leo Laporte
Is that nearby?
- [133:24]
Alex Lindsay
That's kind of, it's in Napa.
- [133:25]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it is Napa.
- [133:26]
Alex Lindsay
It's, that's the big one that you get by Vacaville.
- [133:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, there are, there probably should be Amazon warehouse in every town at this point.
- [133:36]
Alex Lindsay
There. What's interesting, I, I, there's a, I don't remember who had it. There was something that it was, maybe it was an NPR thing where they talked about where they find like places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania is a great place to build a warehouse because it has lots of highways that go to New York and Philadelphia. And so there's, there's these hubs where all these high to interact with each other and they can do, you know, the math. They figure out where that math is and then they just put these massive warehouses. But they're very, the math is they're odd places in the, in the United States that they put them because they, it, it fulfills a very odd set of algorithms.
- [134:12]
Leo Laporte
Logistics is a fascinating subject. I, if I were a young person, I might, I might study that. It's certainly a, well, maybe something AI could do better.
- [134:22]
Alex Lindsay
But you know, they, you know, Omar Bradley said it's, you know, amateurs talk about strategy and professionals talk about logistics.
- [134:28]
Leo Laporte
Right. An army marches on its stomach. Which sounds painful, but. Alex Lindsay Officehours Global 090Media if you want to hire him. What's coming up on your many multifarious platforms?
- [134:42]
Alex Lindsay
We're getting ready for nab. So we're, you know, lots of tests. So you may see. I may try to test out a GDC this week, the new kit. We've got a 5.1 mic that I think I might have talked about earlier.
- [134:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you talked about that.
- [134:56]
Alex Lindsay
Yes. And so we're testing that right now. And so we're going to try a 5.14 K 60 HDR streamed at YouTube. It'll just be on Sunday of nab. I'll just be there. I have another job that came up. But yeah, so that's coming up soon. We had Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford on Gray Matter, Graymatter Show. He is, I mean he's the kind of person like before Facebook bought Oculus. Mark Zuckerberg goes and hangs out with him in Stanford and talk about VR for a while. So he was on, on Gray Matter on last week and he's. That episode just came out today, so it's definitely worth checking out.
- [135:39]
Leo Laporte
Episode 121@ Graymatter show looks. That looks really interesting.
- [135:46]
Alex Lindsay
Listen to that smart guy.
- [135:47]
Leo Laporte
You get great people.
- [135:49]
Alex Lindsay
Michael Krasny, it turns out, has a very deep Rolodex.
- [135:55]
Leo Laporte
Amazing. Thank you, sir. It's a pleasure. Mr. Andy Anato, no longer on GBH on a regular basis, but he is on the. On the socials at Ihnatko. How do I remember that? I have no idea idea how to spell it. I, H, N, A T, K, O. Get it?
- [136:18]
Andy Ihnatko
Thank you.
- [136:18]
Leo Laporte
I have no. And then Otko. Everybody can do Otko. You told me that once and I never forgot it.
- [136:24]
Andy Ihnatko
It was a tip that was given to me by the clerk at the, at a video store that went out of business and she said, I said I love coming here because you're the only. Because back when like your id, like your account number was like your name or whatever. And, and you always put my. The only people who can spell my last name because, oh, I remember, remember it as I have no idea how to spell this person's name. And he said, oh, I'm going to miss you twice as hard.
- [136:47]
Leo Laporte
That's really great mnemonic. Thank you, Andrew. Good to see you, my friend. And also of course, Jason snell. He's@sixcolors.com Many, many podcasts at sixcolors. Com Many, many podcasts, including Upgrade with your rotating hosts.
- [137:04]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I had John Syracusa this week, got Stephen Hackett next week. You know everybody collection of, you know, this Leo. You hang around long enough and you end up knowing a lot of people.
- [137:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's awesome.
- [137:17]
Andy Ihnatko
But the difference is that you, you anger and cheese off a very small percentage of the people that you work.
- [137:22]
Leo Laporte
With, unlike me, wind up with this Rolodex.
- [137:26]
Jason Snell
Unlike me, I try not to cheese the people off. Sometimes the cheese just happens. But you try not to. So. So yeah, people can check that out. My Curly's on paternity leave, so. So it's a good time to get all the guests done. Stars. Get through that Rolodex, make sure that I got all the stars. And yeah, so you got Gruber as.
- [137:45]
Leo Laporte
He was going from simmer to boil. I know. Pretty good.
- [137:48]
Jason Snell
I know. Right in the middle of his emotional crisis. It was good. Two and a half hours of that.
- [137:53]
Leo Laporte
Thank you Jason. Thank you Andy. Thank you Alex. We do this show Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. As I said, you can watch it live on all those different streams, but you can also get a copy of the show after the fact. Twit TV MBW. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the show, so if you want to know where that is, you can search for it. Or go to TWIT TV mbw, there's a link there. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And of course, club members get that special version ad free. So if you're not a member of the club, please join the club. We'd love to have you. Thank you Alex. Thank you Andy. Thank you Jason. Thanks to all of you for listening. And now it is my sad but solemn duty to tell you, get back to work. Break time is over. Bye bye. Get tech news at your pace with TwitTV's perfect pair of shows for quick, focused insights. Tech News Weekly brings you essential interviews with the journalists breaking today's biggest stories. But maybe, maybe you need more. That's why I'm here. Dive deep with me on this Week in Tech. Your first podcast of the week and the last word. In tech industry, insiders dissect everything from AI to privacy to cybersecurity in tech's most influential and longest running roundtable discussion. Short or long, streamlined or comprehensive, TWIT TV keeps you well informed. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your your podcasts and head over to our website TWiT TV for even more independent tech journalism.