MacBreak Weekly 966: Chunks of Corn

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 966: Chunks of Corn – Detailed Summary

Release Date: April 1, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Alex Lindsay, Andy Inotko, Jason Snell

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1. Introduction and April Fools' Day Banter

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming co-hosts Alex Lindsay, Andy Inotko, and Jason Snell. The conversation opens with light-hearted banter about April Fools' Day, highlighting Andy's playful attempt to honor the day by wearing a "number two badge," which leads to humorous exchanges about hidden items from the past.

Notable Quote:

• Andy Inotko: "I thought I'll wear my number two badge and that will be like a soup song of whimsy." [01:02]

2. Apple Operating System Updates: iOS 18.4 and Mac OS 15.4

The hosts discuss the latest Apple software updates, including iOS 18.4 and Mac OS 15.4. However, they note the absence of a WatchOS update, which remains unaddressed due to unexpected bugs that led Apple to pull the release shortly after announcing it.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte: "They haven't explained why. Nobody's gotten an answer from Apple apparently." [18:34]
• Andy Inotko: "Apple intelligence support, for what it's worth, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese." [19:29]

3. Apple's 49th Anniversary and Its Impact on Computing

Celebrating Apple's 49th anniversary, the hosts delve into a hypothetical scenario: "If Apple did not exist, how would computing have been different?" They explore Apple's pivotal role in shaping personal computing by implementing existing technologies in user-friendly ways, thus influencing the industry's trajectory.

Notable Quotes:

• Andy Inotko: "The brilliance of Apple in its first 10 or 15 years wasn't in coming up with something that no one's ever considered before." [28:26]
• Jason Snell: "Apple has definitely made all the technology in the world better in some ways because it was always fundamentally there as an outlier to nudge people in the direction of things that were maybe more humane." [30:46]

4. Apple News Plus Recipes vs. Paprika App

The discussion shifts to Apple News Plus's new recipe feature, which Alex Lindsay compares to the popular Paprika app. While Leo expresses skepticism about the feature's practicality, Alex appreciates its design and curation, though he acknowledges it's not a complete replacement for dedicated recipe apps.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Lindsay: "Even though News Plus isn't the killer feature, I've been using it all the time." [04:03]
• Leo Laporte: "I just find it so much easier to just go out in the inner public Internet and find the news myself." [06:34]

5. Robot Vacuums: Roomba vs. Roborock

The hosts engage in a detailed comparison of robot vacuums, particularly focusing on iRobot's Roomba and Roborock. They discuss Roborock's recent firmware updates enabling HomeKit support and contrast it with iRobot's struggles post the failed acquisition by Amazon. The conversation highlights the competitive landscape and regulatory challenges faced by robot vacuum manufacturers.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell: "Roborock are matter enabled robots now, and app will see those guys." [10:43]
• Jason Snell: "iRobot are not even dominant anymore. They're kind of falling apart." [11:17]

6. AI Image Generation: ChatGPT vs. Apple's Image Playground

The conversation transitions to AI-driven image generation tools. Jason Snell criticizes Apple's Image Playground for lagging behind platforms like ChatGPT and MidJourney in generating quality images. Meanwhile, Andy Inotko praises ChatGPT's advanced capabilities, sharing his positive experiences with AI-generated artwork.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell: "I'm not sure why, if you wanted to generate an image, you'd use a different tool." [07:50]
• Andy Inotko: "I asked ChatGPT to take this picture of a mailbox and make it look like it was painted like that planter. I'll be damned." [21:03]

7. New Emojis in Apple Update

With the latest update, Apple introduces eight new emojis, including a fingerprint, a radish, and the Welsh flag. The hosts express amusement and slight confusion over some of the new additions, debating their utility and representation.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte: "So there's a fingerprint, a splat, a radish, a deserted old oak tree, a harp, a shovel and the Welsh flag." [25:44]
• Jason Snell: "Emoji fragmentation... every platform gets to decide the art for the emoji." [27:22]

8. Privacy and Regulations: App Tracking Transparency

A significant portion of the discussion centers on Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its regulatory repercussions in Europe, particularly in France. The hosts dissect Apple's stance on user privacy versus regulatory demands, highlighting tensions between tech companies and government bodies.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell: "Apple is being fined for protecting their users... it seems kind of misguided." [74:42]
• Leo Laporte: "Tim Cook said, in the long run, Apple's going to be best known for its health initiatives." [53:39]

9. Utah App Store Accountability Act

Following the broader EU regulatory issues, the hosts delve into the Utah App Store Accountability Act. They discuss Apple's resistance to the law, which mandates stricter age verification processes for apps. Suggestions include parent-controlled birthdate inputs to balance privacy with regulatory compliance.

Notable Quotes:

• Andy Inotko: "What we need is for an app to simply get a yes or no answer from the device saying that is this app appropriate for this user." [80:22]
• Alex Lindsay: "Our lawmakers are not technically equipped mentally to be able to write these laws." [82:40]

10. NaNoWriMo Shutting Down and the Importance of Writing

The hosts express disappointment over NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) shutting down. They reflect on the program's impact on aspiring writers, emphasizing the importance of consistent writing habits and the challenges faced by nonprofits in sustaining such initiatives.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Lindsay: "NaNoWriMo did it. I wrote three novels. That's awesome." [119:18]
• Andy Inotko: "Writing is finishing something and it's awful. That's what writing is." [125:48]

11. CarPlay Updates and Car Manufacturers' Responses

A substantial segment is dedicated to Apple's next-generation CarPlay and its integration challenges with car manufacturers. The hosts critique the Apple-centric design of CarPlay and discuss the reluctance of automakers like Porsche and BMW to fully adopt Apple's vision, advocating for more user-centric and interoperable solutions.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Lindsay: "Most carmakers don't want to compete with Apple's interface. It's so bad because they're not trying to build a product that includes the user." [85:59]
• Jason Snell: "It's madness. You would never think that, but they're like installing an app we approve and it's not going to work as well as your phone." [87:22]

12. Conclusion and Community Engagement

Wrapping up, the hosts encourage listeners to support the show through Club Twit memberships, highlighting the benefits of ad-free content and community engagement. They also briefly mention upcoming segments and thank their sponsors.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte: "Thank you, Andy. Awesome. Pick of the week. Alex Gibson." [138:33]
• Jason Snell: "Hands On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to." [147:08]

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 966 of MacBreak Weekly, titled "Chunks of Corn," offers a comprehensive exploration of Apple's latest software updates, the company's enduring influence on the technology landscape, and the evolving dynamics between tech giants and regulatory bodies. The hosts provide insightful critiques on AI tools, privacy issues, and the future of integrated technologies like CarPlay. Additionally, the episode touches on the importance of writing communities and the challenges faced by nonprofit initiatives. Throughout, notable quotes and candid conversations underscore the hosts' expertise and candid perspectives on current tech trends.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Alex, it's time for Mac Break Weekly. Alex, Andy and Jason are here, and so is iOS 18.4 and Mac OS 15.4. But where's our WatchOS update? We'll talk about all of that in just a little bit. And we'll celebrate a very special birthday. Apple Incorporated 49 years ago today. If Apple did not exist, how would computing have been different? We'll talk about that and a whole lot more next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Weekly. Episode 966, recorded Tuesday, April 1st, 2025. Chunks of corn. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple News with Mr. Andy Inotko. Hello, Andre.

[Andy Inotko]

Hey there. Hey there. Ho there. Happy April Fool's Day.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Andy Inotko]

I know, I know. I thought, I thought that only to honor it. Like, I was. I was doing some house cleaning this week and I found my, like, number two badge from the prisoner.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Andy Inotko]

And I thought, oh, I'll wear my number two badge and that will be like a soup song of whimsy. And then I thought that, well, perhaps.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't really have that in your cupboard since 1982. I mean.

[Andy Inotko]

No, it was for like the. The next. I have. I have a. I told you all a while back that, like, I happen to be going to the Met Opera, like, on Halloween.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, I remember.

[Andy Inotko]

And so I put together a Boba Fett cosplay that would be appropriate for the Met Opera. And then I thought, gee, I think I want to have, like, another one of those standing by for like, the next time that happens. And so I have a. I have a number two costume, like, including the right. Including exactly the right scarf. Exactly the right shoes, too. Ready to go.

[Leo Laporte]

The scarf could do double duty for a kind of Doctor who thing as well, I would imagine.

[Andy Inotko]

Kind of. But this is what I love about the Internet. There is, like, if you go to the replica, the prop forum, there is somebody who has freeze framed and said, no, no, no, here's. It's not just a school. A college scarf. It is. Here is the exact frequency of the stripes on it and the routine of colors. And also, then someone came, hey, here's a company that does, like, school uniform that will actually make whatever you want. And so I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's the last time I introduce Andy First. Jason Snell is also here. I've decided to be Baron. Same for this. The intellectual Baron.

[Jason Snell]

It's not Halloween, though. That's not how that works. Oh, hello everybody. I look forward to us discussing the latest Android news and what's going on with Surface and tell us more about Alexa and if we're really lucky, maybe some. I have a Palm Galaxy Talk.

[Andy Inotko]

It's the 20th anniversary of Apple being bought out by sun and rescuing the company.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh God, wouldn't that be o. And also Alex, I called you Alex Gibson before the show. But he isn't. He's Alex Lindsay.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, it's new for you. You know, I'm new in the show.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll get used to it eventually, you know, you'll.

[Alex Lindsay]

You'll get used to the Gibson. Lindsay.

[Leo Laporte]

Lindsay. They're very close. They're both kind of British and Alex Gibson. Look, we change your lower third to reflect that Office hours global. Whatever his name is.

[Andy Inotko]

That's where identity theft is not a joke. Jim.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Bob. 184 and 154 came out last night. I snuck up into the attic and rebooted all the machines to bring them up to date. And I think that every 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 devices have now been updated. I believe in the house.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think my problem is that I'm on the betas, so I don't never know what. You don't know what's work, what's working, what's not working. When are people going to see things? You know, I'm kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I could tell you recipes in News plus is not exactly the killer feature.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have to admit that I'm using it all the time. Like really, I've had it for. I was like, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You've heard of the Internet? Yes, it is.

[Alex Lindsay]

But here's. But. Oh, have. You haven't used it right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I have no ads.

[Alex Lindsay]

The timers are built in. It's easy to tag. I mean it.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't used it with the timers. Oh, that's cool. So it does have timers.

[Alex Lindsay]

Do this thing and you push a little button and it just opens up a timer. Like it. Like in the. In it. In the app. It's. It's not perfect. Like there's definitely a lot of things that I would love to, you know, but as a, you know, step by step, I think that there's. I haven't found a way and maybe I'm just haven't played with it enough. Is I really wanted to build a shopping list, you know, like it just, you know, it tells you what the ingredients are in its own section. The big thing is, is that on the web, and in most of these, either. These are, These are all recipes, I think, that come from the magazine partners that are part of Apple News. Yes, that's where this is coming from when you go to the Web, you know, of course, because the way the recipe business works, every 10, you know, seconds, I mean, every, every, like, one inch, you get another ad, and there's all this stuff that you have to kind of dig through. And, you know, I guess you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't know. You don't use an ad blocker or anything?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, no, but I use paprika, which will. What.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Yeah, that's what I do.

[Alex Lindsay]

And you just say paprika, look at this. And it goes, right. I'll just grab all the things and put it. And I don't. Yeah, I don't. I don' A lot of extensions to my, My stuff. So anyway, but, so, so anyway, the. So you think it's better, is what you're saying? I don't think it's better than paprika. I just think that it's good enough that paprika isn't big. You know, like, like the, the. The thing is, it's very limited. It's.

[Jason Snell]

Well, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I just do a web search for the recipe I want. I know, and I find it, and then I put it in paprika.

[Alex Lindsay]

And that's what I do. And that's what I do. But, but for me, what I love is that it goes by like it shows up every morning. I mean, I use Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't care what the Apple editors think is a good recipe.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I go through. What happens is it shows you one, and then it shows you a whole list. And I just kind of scroll through looking for things that are like, oh, that looks like that'd be interesting. Oh, that looks like that'd be interesting. It's not replacing paprika for me. It's just that it's like, it's really, well, well designed, well laid out. You know, as a, As a version one, I think it's actually, I've been, you know, using it for a couple weeks, and as a version one, I think it's pretty slick.

[Leo Laporte]

I have it on my iPad. I don't have it on this laptop, oddly enough. So is it not.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've never seen it on a laptop. I've only.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not in. It's not in the Mac.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've only used it on the phone because that's how I cook. Okay, so if I, If I cook I'm cooking off my phone. I don't cook on the phone. It doesn't get that hot. But it. I use the phone as my guide.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. Here's the thing. I. The biggest problem, it's a general problem with News plus, which is it's an editorial selection of the news. And I just find it so much easier to just go out in the inner. The public Internet and find the news myself. And it's the same for recipes in a way. I just don't. Jason, you don't use. You use some other.

[Jason Snell]

I use Mela, which is Sylvia Oritzi, which is a great app too, and so is Paprika. They're really good. They do. They're very similar where you can parse pages and pull them in and save.

[Leo Laporte]

Them in your own platform. So it's on everything.

[Jason Snell]

And I don't care about that.

[Leo Laporte]

MLAs.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I don't care.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's a. It's a. Apple platforms only, so it's very good, well designed.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, the. I have to admit that probably at this point, 50% of my recipes are chatgpt. So I don't really, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S, you know, that's the shameful thing. I don't want to say. But when I. My actual search starts, like when I wanted to make bagels in perplexity.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well. And what I do is I go.

[Leo Laporte]

From there to the sources if I need to.

[Alex Lindsay]

A lot of times I've really tried to eat everything that I bought, you know, which is hard when you go, you know what I mean by that is that you buy a bunch of produce. I don't. I buy mostly produce. I buy very few packages of things. And so I end up with a bunch of produce. I've kind of whittled away a bunch of it. And then I'm like, okay, so I have this, this and this leftover that was, you know, aspirational or. Or it was something. I buy a lot of stuff. Like, I see a piece of produce that I've never used before, I'm like, I'll buy one and see. Figure this out. And. And. But I come home and I go, I got this thing. How do I cook it? You know, or we have a csa, you know, you get the box of vegetables, half of them are stuff you've never seen before, and it's great. You go, I have a white radish and a pink cauliflower and something else.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't do that news. Plus, you do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I do that. In chat. But I will say that what I like about it is, is that that's, that's a user driven way to find, you know, find something that is kind of random to some degree. But it comes out 95%. It comes out good. But what I love is that I love actually the curation of. Oh, these are, you know. Oh, I didn't think about putting those two things together. I didn't think. And it. From visually and from the title it looks like it might be interesting. So I just tab it like I, I tab a lot of things. I haven't cooked them all. I've, you know, I cook them. But I call when I'm brainstorming 18.

[Leo Laporte]

For the Homemaker Edition because it also adds robot vacuums to home kit. So maybe this is the homemaker version.

[Alex Lindsay]

Robot vacuums. Does anyone have one? They really freak me out. Like I keep thinking that I should get one.

[Leo Laporte]

You have one?

[Jason Snell]

I have a ro. Roomba. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

You like it?

[Andy Inotko]

I just, I just wish that I was. My house was tiny. Listening.

[Alex Lindsay]

Jason kind of rolled his eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you use a Roomba or would it have to be a. Maybe an all terrain Roomba?

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, me too. It's like I've got so many cables going here and there. I've got like in my office. It's basically goat paths. It's not, I mean it's not like sort of hoarders, but it's like a box got put someplace because I need to remember to.

[Jason Snell]

Modern. Modern robot vacuums either use visual or lidar and they avoid piles of things. Cables are a little bit harder sometimes they will do that. I have three pets in my house. I do have a Roomba. It works fine. It really is solving the problem of my wife and I are not going to sweep every day. We're just not going to do it every day. And I can run the robot every day and it, it helps. It fills its little bag full of cat hair, so. And dog hair. So that's great. And dust it. Could it be better? Yes. Is it designed. Are robot vacuums designed for people who do not work at home? Yes. They are loud and annoying. They get in your way. Every. It seems like every time I want to be in the kitchen, the robot is in the kitchen and I'm stepping around the robot or it's bumping into my leg or whatever. But like, I like it. I wish it was quieter and I wish it was more efficient, but I keep using it because it picks stuff up and we have lots of pets in our house. And I just, it, it really does help since we're not you know, sweeping or vacuuming twice a day.

[Leo Laporte]

What else is an 18 4/15 4.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, and I guess I should say it's, it's some newer models from Roomba I think for my robot, but definitely for roborock which is I think now.

[Leo Laporte]

The number one home kit enabled.

[Jason Snell]

And they're, and what they are is they're like matter enabled robots. And now app will see those guys. Although if you've got like Homebridge or something, you can enable other robots pretty easily.

[Leo Laporte]

9 to 5 Mac is saying that Roborock.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, Roborock.

[Leo Laporte]

They're number one. They're number one.

[Jason Snell]

They's number one.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I never even heard of them.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's, yeah, they're big and very popular.

[Leo Laporte]

They're rolling out a firmware Update to put HomeKit support on its. A handful of its models which is, it's hard to hold them in your hand. But they are quite a few. The S8 Max V, the Saros Z70, 1010 R, the Qravo Curve. Well, how did Roboro. Wait a minute, I thought iRobot was the dominant company.

[Jason Snell]

They were. I mean there's actually a great episode of the Vergecast a couple weeks ago where David Pierce talked to Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy who is their smart home. She's so good and she's got a million robot vacuums because she covers that category for them. And she tells the story about how iRobot, basically they, they were going to get bought by Amazon and they were such a dominant player in the, in the robot vacuum market at that time that there were a lot of, there were a lot of regulatory issues and the deal was off. And what happened in those two years while that deal was going on is they weren't sure what their strategy was going to be because Amazon was supposedly going to buy them and all of their patents started to expire and Chinese companies started to build kind of originally knockoffs and then just sound familiar improvements on the original. And in a rapid period of time the Amazon thing fell through. They were too dominant. They lost their dominance. They got way behind. They are, they may be close to needing to be bailed out by a buyer because they might go out of business. And they've, they sort of pivoted to making robots that are much more like the competition than they used to be, despite their many years of R and D. It's kind of a sad story that involves, I mean I would say the saddest Part about it is they lost a lot of velocity when Amazon wanted to buy them and the fact that they got that the deal got knocked off and the result is that they're not even dominant anymore. They're kind of falling apart.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you use your Roomba with Homekit?

[Jason Snell]

I have Homebridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you need Homebridge.

[Jason Snell]

Which will let me do that. Although what I do. So the roomba app for iOS for people who have Roomba's out there has widgets. And so what I do is I have. And it has shortcut support. So I actually have a shortcuts widget with all my robot commands in it. So I can. And it's on my like the little widget screen that's to the left of the home screen.

[Leo Laporte]

How many pages do you have on your iPhone?

[Jason Snell]

I don't. I have one, Leo. But then I also have the widgets on the side that you kind of. You swipe in Smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And it's got a. It's a. It's a single widget with four shortcuts on it. And the shortcuts are like open the app, send it home, pause it, or I forget what it is, start it again, or something like that. And that's what I use to control it. So I don't even use the app. But it's not automated. I use their. I use its built in automation.

[Leo Laporte]

I stop swiping over when my 401k started plummeting. And so I kind of want to see.

[Jason Snell]

You need to take stocks off of your phone.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to take stocks off my phone. That's what you need to clearly talk about. It's not doom scrolling, it's side scrolling, but it's doom. All right. All right. Also E, E this, the eco. The Eco Vax D bot. These are all Chinese, aren't they? Let's admit it.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yeah, the Chinese have. Have figured this out. And like I said, they sort of start. It's the classic pattern. They started making knockoffs and then they started improving and it was at a moment where iRobot was kind of in flux and they kind of shot past them.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it interesting? I mean, that happened with drones. It's happened with everything. Phones, drones. I was listening this morning to a country boy will survive. And I thought, yeah, unless the country boy is using anything made in China, these will all cost more as soon as the tariffs kick in tomorrow on Liberation Day. Congratulations. So get your D bot now, I guess.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Anthony Nielsen in the Discord pointing out something that's absolutely true. Which is this is what happened with EVs as well.

[Leo Laporte]

EVs as well by not in the.

[Jason Snell]

United States because we aren't allowed, but everywhere, everywhere else. The Chinese EVs are cheap and pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's ironic because as Flow Connect's pointing out in our discord that iRobot came out of DARPA research in the United States.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, originally they were. I mean, Jennifer Pattison tells the story and I should say she was also on Tech News Weekly with Micah talking about this topic too.

[Leo Laporte]

Or she was.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, she was. But yeah, they used to be a much more kind of highfalutin robot research company. And then eventually they said, oh, people want us to make vacuums.

[Leo Laporte]

Or as we think of them, cat transporters. Yeah. Okay, well, Anything else in 18:4 that's thrilling and exciting.

[Andy Inotko]

There's a new ambient mode for audio. So now like if you write in the control center, if you want to say, oh, I want music to study from, or I'm trying to get to sleep, or I'm trying to chill, or I'm trying to meditate, there's actually like five categories you can just check. I don't care what it is. Just give me like ambient sound for meditating and it will.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, you know what Spotify does with that is they play fake music. So is this going to be real music? What is it going to be? Used it, you know, I hope it's real. That's a, you know, that's kind of an issue on Spotify.

[Andy Inotko]

And they're also very proud of expanding AI to more languages and more countries, including Vision os. Yeah, it doesn't seem like to be a huge, like feature update Mail is.

[Leo Laporte]

Getting the, the new categorization feature, right?

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah. So that's, that's, that's something.

[Leo Laporte]

Now let me ask a question. Is this update going to re enable Apple intelligence?

[Andy Inotko]

Not the stuff that's screwing up. I mean, it is. I mean, you are getting priority notifications.

[Leo Laporte]

If you turned it off though, will the update turn it back on? It has in the past, right?

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I suspect. I mean, I guess we all have it turned on.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, that's like a dark pattern that no one's happy with. Like things seem to be getting turned back on whether you want it or not. Or in some cases, like when you do the update that it opts you into something, it doesn't give you a clear way to opt out Again, when it says, oh, congratulations, we've given you this feature that we're not sure that you want but we want to make sure you use. You're welcome.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Snell. Did you run off and get your Roomba? Is that where you went?

[Jason Snell]

I'm having a bee issue in my right now. A bee has got button in and I'm trying to see if I can get it back out.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, please.

[Jason Snell]

If. If you hear me screaming, it's because the bees have attacked. Not the bees. Not the bees.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's the bees.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, there's. There's a little bees. There's a little bee carpenter bee that's making a. Making a little nest outside and I my office and I think maybe one of them got in. So not great. Not great. Please stand by. That's not a new feature of 154 by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

If you need to run off, please don't hesitate.

[Jason Snell]

Yes. If I just am not here for a while that's probably why if I.

[Leo Laporte]

Hear ladylike screams I will know.

[Jason Snell]

Oh dear.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I do.

[Andy Inotko]

I just want you Spalding.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you know. So are we done? I mean 154 you should probably update. They're probably security updates that we.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, yeah they're usually there was a bunch there. It's also interesting a couple of one a couple of interesting things that there was. They updated as usual, everything but the update for WatchOS got pulled like almost immediately. They haven't explained why. Nobody's gotten an answer from Apple apparently. I guess there was a bug that got found very, very late so that got pulled. They also released security updates for a bunch of Macs and devices that don't run like the latest drop so that's interesting too. So if you're running like an older iPhone or an older Mac, if they invite you to update, given that's a security alert, they probably will. It's probably a good idea to update that. But yeah, this isn't like a game changing update. This is just another point one eight new emojis. Well I forgot about that.

[Jason Snell]

And actually for people Apple intelligence support, for what it's worth, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese. I mean like there's good. I don't know if that happened during the B incident but yes, Andy mentioned it during the bunch a bunch of languages which is nice. And the quick Start feature which we talked about a couple weeks ago where just like with your phone, you can hold a phone next to a new Mac and it'll. It'll sort of zap over your Apple ID and stuff and just make it easier to log in and set it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh I like that. That's that old cloud, that funny little cloud thing. Yeah, yeah. That you could take a picture of. You get a new sketch style in Apple. Image Playground.

[Jason Snell]

Do.

[Leo Laporte]

Has anybody continued to play with Image Playground or is that just like.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, a lot of us have Mid journey and then ChatGPT came out last week and we're.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, that's right, Ironic.

[Leo Laporte]

Studio Ghibli and Image Playground.

[Jason Snell]

I play it. I play with Image Playground. Ironically, I do enjoy. And still, here's the thing, I still make Genmojis, and I think they're fun. In fact, I think that Apple has failed in making them as fun as they should be because you've got your emoji reactions and messages and they're too small. They need to blow them up and make them bigger so you can see what your. What emoji you're reacting there. But I still will make them there. Maybe a couple of times a week I make an idea for a fun emoji to react or something. But Image Playgrounds, I mean, I'm sure there are people out there who don't know any better who are using them, but they're not good. And they're so far behind the state of the art that I don't know why, if you wanted to generate an image, you'd use a different tool.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now, particularly ChatGPT.

[Andy Inotko]

I'm sorry. Go ahead, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Go ahead, Andy.

[Andy Inotko]

I was just going to say, like ChatGPT, the native image has been blowing me away. Like, where I'm at the point where it's like I'm going to start giving it things I don't think it should be able to do. Like, I took. I'm sorry, I didn't put this in the notes or anything because it's spontaneous. But so I said, okay, there's like, on my walk on last week, there's a battered old, like, standard, like, mailbox, you know, US Postal Service mailbox. And later on in the walk, there's this house that has these beautifully, like, Mexican painted. If you go to my Instagram, I think I've posted it, there's like this beautifully painted, like, Mexican planters. So I said, okay, take. I asked, I asked ChatGPT take this picture of a mailbox and make it look like it was painted, like the beautiful colors and styles of that planter. And I'll be damned. It basically looks perfectly like this mailbox was painted like that planter. It's like, I was hoping you would fail miserably, and now I don't know what to Expect about anything we did on Sunday.

[Leo Laporte]

I played around with it. I made a Rembrandt style Twit logo, complete with brush strokes. We also did. I think this was Ian Thompson in Studio Ghibli mode. Why are you not showing this? There we go. Thank you. There's Mona Lisa and Van Gogh style and Grumpy Cat. We had to do the obligatory Studio Ghibli. So that's. You know, look at that. And there's the disaster girl. The house on fire. And she's smiling. Compare that to Image Playground.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think, as Jason said, I think if you don't know any. If you're not using any of these, and you're like, oh, this is not. Look. Look at what I can do. I think it kind of makes sense. I think that for those of us who are kind of in it. I mean, because I use it for practical things like my. My yard. Like, I looked at the. I looked at the yard. It's not doing very well. Took a picture of my yard and just told it to design something new, like this design, you know, like. And I want it to be kind of, you know, I said, you know, and. And it did.

[Leo Laporte]

It. It did a great job.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like, I'm trying to.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Chat GPT, not Image Playground.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. And so the thing is, is that you're so used to it just work here' mid journey and chatgpt. I'm just so used to. It just works like that. I get cool things out of it. Maybe it's not exactly what I wanted, but it's still amazing that. That when I go to Image Playground, you're like, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Incidentally, just as we were doing that on Twitt on Sunday, Sam Altman tweeted, can you please stop? You're killing us.

[Andy Inotko]

So we're being loved to death. Yeah, love.

[Leo Laporte]

That's to death.

[Andy Inotko]

A great problem to have, but still a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, well, it's a problem when it. When it costs a lot of money to create these things, you know, but that's.

[Andy Inotko]

That's what I was. I was gonna. I was gonna mention that, like, now the ethics become a little bit more complicated because we can still say that. Okay, well, look, if we're trying to. If all we're doing is saying, oh, please make this look like it was drawn, but in the Studio Ghibli style. That's where. Okay, well, gosh, you're. These AIs were trained with this. With this artwork that's created by humans without their permission. But when you get to things like, I want to make this mailbox look like it was painted. Like I'm giving you everything I just want. I'm saying paint this like it was painted by the same people who painted that. And it gives you a perfect photo of it. That's when you start to say, yes, this was still developed and trained with stolen photos, stolen artwork. But now you get to the subtle question of artists were also trained, so to speak, by being influenced by other artists. Are we now in a broad category of you can't point to any, any one artist or any school of art that's being ripped off here. It's now a binary thing where you have to say, it's just learning how to take A person has decided that I want this to look like that. I'm giving you all of the stuff to work with, created by human hands. Now, what are the ethical implications of this? This is becoming more and more interesting as we go on.

[Leo Laporte]

Here are the. Oh, actually, I'm going to try this. Dr. Dew suggested a ChatGPT prompt. Paint me like one of French girls. So I'm going to try the. Yeah, maybe we should. We should hold off for a little while on that one. New emojis are here. There are eight of them. And this will help you in your emoji playground. You have. What is that? A woeful smiley face. There's a fingerprint, a splat, a radish, a deserted old oak tree, a harp, a shovel and the Welsh flag.

[Jason Snell]

You are not entirely right. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Where did I go wrong here? It's face with bags under eyes is the official Unicode description.

[Jason Snell]

I think it's technically like a root vegetable.

[Leo Laporte]

It says root vegetable, leafless tree, harp, shovel and sark. I thought it was whales.

[Jason Snell]

Sark is an island in the channel. It's one of the sort of semi independent channel. The king is still in charge there, but it's not part of the uk.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuck them in Wales and I totally apologize to all our Sarkians.

[Jason Snell]

Doesn't it feel like we're running out of the need for new emoji now, boy?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's got to be every other flag in there, right? By now.

[Jason Snell]

If that's. If that's where we are.

[Leo Laporte]

If that's where we are, I'll be using that Sark flag for something.

[Andy Inotko]

And also like if for. For like. Like fan. Fan communities for the movie Tron. Because Sark was the main villain.

[Jason Snell]

Sure. It'd be like any kind of David Warner emoji program.

[Leo Laporte]

Sock. Beautiful. Long overdue, long Overdue the troll emoji revised during the 15.4beta period. So we don't get a troll emoji. According to Emojipedia, the green troll usually shown holding a club. There. There's some discussion. Apple's troll holds a scepter instead of a club. Okay, whatever.

[Jason Snell]

Anyway, anti troll.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. An anti troll.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. New New New Syria flag too.

[Leo Laporte]

And thank God, there is a bagel. Okay. There is a bagel and the bagel appears to have cream cheese, but that's been around or something.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. But keep in mind that it's all down to the implementation because we live in a world of what's called, delightfully, emoji fragmentation, where every platform gets to decide the art for the emoji. And they try these days, they try to not be an outlier because it can lead to deep confusion if you send something on your end on an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

Somebody on a completely different kind of. I got a root vegetable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. By the way, the bags under this guy's eyes are not that baggy. They could be bad. Look at my eyes. They're much baggier than that. So I guess it's just a tape.

[Andy Inotko]

How tired down are we by like by work that we said? No, no, he's not exhausted enough. He. He doesn't look weather beaten enough to be.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not my any. No. No, sir.

[Jason Snell]

Reap.

[Leo Laporte]

Bob. I kind of buried the lead here. This is the 49th anniversary of Apple's incorporation.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Andy Inotko]

April Fools.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. So next year is going to be something, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think they'll do big 50th?

[Andy Inotko]

I think so.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

All of our favorite Companies are turning 50. Microsoft's turning 50. All of them. Computing would be totally. This is William Gallagher writing an Apple and science. Computing would be totally different had Apple not been formed 49 years ago today. That's an interesting question. If Apple had not did not exist, would we have had to create it? Would we have come up with something similar?

[Andy Inotko]

I don't know. The thing is, that's a great topic because the thing is, the brilliance of Apple in its first 10 or 15 years wasn't in coming up with something that no one's ever considered before. They're mostly implementing things that have been talked about and were being developed and other nerds had been building for a long time. But the idea of having a desktop computer that's based on the 6502 processor, that has its own onboard video, that has its own keyboard, putting it together in a way that it makes sense and can make that next leap. Same thing for the Lisa, same thing for the Mac where it's not that they necessarily invented the drop down interface. We all know the story about ZeroPark, but these were things that Xerox and other people have been basically working with for a whole while. They're the first people who basically went all in on this in a way that, here's an actual working version of this that you can actually evaluate on your own. So I don't know, the influence they've had every time they've dropped something like the Mac, the Apple, the Apple II or the iPhone is inarguable. On the other hand, these are paths that other people were walking down. So it's interesting to wonder if like, if CPM and like S100 architecture would have won out. And now instead of having proprietary hardware and proprietary operating systems, the basic, the 82 percenter of the entire world is build your own hardware, bring your own software. Here are standards that will help it work. And you don't necessarily have to be all in on any one company or platform. And so instead of a handful of trillion dollar companies, you have a whole bunch, bunch of billion dollar companies that are sharing the more slices of the pie.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry to say that I could.

[Jason Snell]

Go ahead, I could jump in there and say, yeah, I. Such a great hypothetical question. My gut feeling is that everything got nudged a little bit more by the presence of Apple as a company that was a little bit of a renegade. Right. Like, like I don't, I think a lot of stuff is inevitable in terms of tech, but I think that there's also paths that don't get walked down or don't get walked down in the same way. And so, you know, would Windows 95 have been in existence if the Mac didn't exist or would computers still look like computers? Probably wouldn't look like Windows 3.1, but they wouldn't necessarily look like modern Windows, let alone MacBooks. But going back to when Apple was.

[Leo Laporte]

Founded in 19, what is it, 79, 76, 49. It was a green, black, green text on a black screen. All caps.

[Jason Snell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

40 characters. We didn't have GUIs.

[Jason Snell]

No. Back in those days, I mean they were, they were trying to nudge, it's the same thing, right? They were trying to nudge the personal computer, the new personal computer industry into being friendlier, into being something that could be more appliance. Like that was obviously a Steve Jobs obsession. Was like, how do we get this in a, in a friendlier More appliance, like way. And that drove, you know, drove other companies in that space to try and react to that and be more consumer friendly in the early days. And then there was the nudge with the Mac and the interface and all of that. The nudge with the all touch smartphone design is another great example of that later on. You know, I, it's hard. Like, I don't think, I mean, we're talking parallel universes, sliding doors here. But it, I don't. Apple has definitely made all the technology in the world better in some ways because it was always. It's just sort of fundamentally there as an outlier to kind of nudge people in the direction of things that were maybe more humane in a bunch of ways. We could argue about the Net, but I feel like you do need an agitator and I'm not sure they would have had the right proper agitator to do things like push the tech industry to be a little more humane than it otherwise would have been.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that there's a handful of places where Apple changed the paradigm and then there's a lot of places where Apple just made it way better, you know, like what was already happening. So if you look at the, you know, I had an Apple too or whatever long, you know, but there was a lot of other things that I was also using a Radio Shack and a Commodore 64 and you know, like, and they were all kind of equal, like, you know, like they were all. I was using them all that none of them were particularly better. In fact, I would say the Commodore in my opinion might have been. Could arguably be better than the, than the Apple. The Apple's what I had at home. But the Commodore could do a lot of other graphic stuff. But when the Mac came out, I just like, you know, it was just a completely different shift of what was possible. And then, then there was just a, you know, then there was just a lot of progression of that for. And then I think the ipod wasn't revolutionary as much as it was just. It very much refined an idea. You know, it took something that everybody else was doing and then you said, okay, well let's show it. Let's. Let's show you what design can do. You know, like, here's what can design can do for your thing. Apple's very good at that. Like, like the watch with. It's not that they're revolutionizing something as much as they're just, just showing you. If you just polish it up a little bit, it's going to get it's going to be a lot more popular than what you were doing. It's not that it's doing something different. It's just making it a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable to do it.

[Jason Snell]

I don't want to get into, you know, too much into the deep mythology here, but, I mean, I think the truth is it comes back to that connection between Jobs and Wozniak, where I think if you look at a lot of those companies back then, what you had is they were. They were founded by and operated by a bunch of tech nerds, and they had very similar sensibilities. And so, you know, even like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, you've got people who are very similar in their outlook. And the advantage of that weird dynamic between Jobs and Wozniak is that Woz was the tech guy. He was a lot like those other founders. But Jobs wasn't like, he wasn't that technical, but he grew up in the Valley and he knew technical people and he had, like, different kinds of ideas. And, you know, you look back at the Jobs biographies, kind of a strange guy, but what was most important. And he was kind of a hippie and he was eating fruit for a while and all of these things.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? He has an only.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but, you know, and he went to read and he took a calligraphy class, which is why he cared about fonts. And, like, there's so many of these stories. And I think that is one of the fundamental root things, if we are. Okay, I guess I am talking mythology a little bit here about what made Apple different is that one of their key people and leaders throughout that whole period was a guy who was not like all the other guys, and they were all guys who were founding these. These computer companies in that era, because Jobs just, you know, he. He was thinking of other things and trying to broaden things out. And that made Apple a little bit weirder and different and have different goals that. But still had the incredible tech backing of Wozniak, who is a total tech genius.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And I think. I think that you have this mixture of, you know, you have accountants of, like, how much is this going to cost? And you have techie guys that are just like, well, it's good enough to do the thing. Like, the button works, you know, like that kind of thing. And. And there was a. I think that one of the things you see with Apple a lot and folks who. And here's the thing is how, when we look at how much it affects things and folks that use Macs like You know, use Apple software, are super sensitive to it. And, and if you let them actually run some of the design, you look at a, a program like, you know, Frame IO or service like Frame IO, which Adobe bought from Emory Wells, who was on this show long, long ago. Emery. What Emory brought to Frame IO was great taste. And so, you know, like, like, what he brought was he. He's super particular and he wants the button to work just so, and he wants everything to feel a certain way when you're doing it. And you feel that through the entire interface and it's pleasurable to use, you know, like, and it's. And you go to. There's other things, like, because I use lots of these Aspera and like, Aspera, you feel like you're opening up a Unix window. Like, it's like there's no design. I'm sure there was some design, just not very much, you know, to make it work. It's really fast. But it's not the same as you open up Frame IO and you just feel like someone actually thought about this. And I think that that's the difference. And I think it's not just that Apple did all these things. It's that that the people who use that hardware and that software also are picky, you know, and push the things, you know, and aren't willing to put up with very much. Not work. Not.

[Andy Inotko]

The very big deal that separated Apple, particularly in the 70s and 80s, is that they had a point of view, they had a creative point of view about what technology could be. Creating software, creating hardware is a creative act. It's not just simply engineering, picking the right component to put into the right kind of circuit. And there was a lot of opportunity for a lot of different outcomes. Like, Apple didn't break word processing open. That was probably wordstar and Kaypro. CPM was like the word processing platform. They broke open spreadsheets with VisiCalc as being like the default platform for VisiCalc. But quickly other platforms were able to do that just as well. So the question becomes, why would I want to go to any one of those other platforms? If they're giving me more choices, I can do them less expensively. Like with the Commodore 64, all these other things, it's like, no, this has a point of view that I understand. This is a style that I like and that I understand the story that they're trying to tell with their products. And so therefore, I feel as though there's something special about. And Specifically an Apple IIE running AppleWriter or running Apple Works. That is not the same as a Kaypro 2 running WordPress star on CPM.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I, I also want to mention we're talking, since I'm saying what was weird about Jobs in those days, what wasn't. But he was a business. He was like a. A business guy. Even when he was a hippie without shoes, smelly eating fruit, he was a. He was always like, how do I sell this? How do I get, you know, a little. Not necessarily like a con man, but he was kind of like a. A mover and an actor and a cajoler. And I honestly again, think that some of those companies in that era had people who thought that way, but some of them didn't. And they were babes in the woods and, and, and the ones that survived at all had somebody who was doing that. And that was the other bit of protection I think, that that Jobs gave Apple is that he was ruthless when he needed to be, and he was always trying to think about where he could make money, and he was always happy to promise things that he didn't know he could deliver, which is that classic story about how they promised a certain number of Apple ones even to get the company started, and they did not have the them. And so it was bs, basically. But he knew that if they agreed, he would have the money to make them and they would be, you know. Right. Like that. You need somebody like that. So. So they had. They had some special characteristics, and that's why they were different. And that's why, you know, that's. I don't know if that explains Apple all the way to 2025, but it does explain how they got out of 1976 and made it far enough along to get enough momentum to do a lot of interesting things. And why they're in their DNA is something that's a little bit off and different and that makes them a different company.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In his more recent years, when Woz has been a little less judicious about talking about Jobs, I remember him saying, every time I came up with an idea, Steve would say, we can make a business out of that. Going back to the blue, boxing, you know, phone cracking stuff, we can make a business out of that. They did. And there was an alchemy, I think, without was, you don't have it without Jobs, you don't have it.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. It was a magic. A magic pair of mismatched pals. I mean, this. Now it's a buddy movie, but, like, it kind of is. That was.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the brilliant tension There was tension. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

I think in a lot of great duos, there is. There is that tension. Right. A lot of great groups and duos, like, in music and things like that, you have to have a little bit of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think. I think it forces people to prove what their belief is, you know, like they have to prove it and push it up against something. If they don't have that, they can easily just go down the wrong path for a long way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I wonder if there are any examples of that we could cite in recent life. Let's take a little. I'll leave that as an exercise for the listener. Let's take a little break. We'll come back with more. We're Happy Anniversary, Apple. Yeah. I wonder what they're going to do next year. That'll be. That'll be an April Fool's to remember. No April Fool's jokes in this show. Except for my hat and Andy's button. We are. We are. I did briefly consider starting the show with Lisa wearing my shirt, but then I thought better of it and changed my mind. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, April Fool's edition with no April Fool's jokes. Remember, Google used to spend, like, many, many cycles. Every division had an April Fool's joke. They don't do good ones, too.

[Andy Inotko]

Like, hey, how about playing Pacman on Google Maps streets? Like, how about yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How about we spent 400 hours developing that and 400 hours we maybe could have used to make Maps better. How about that? Anyway, I'm glad that most of the stories I saw this morning were real. And no, Tesla did not get purchased by Amazon, just, you know, in case you saw that. Yeah.

[Andy Inotko]

And the Zen browser I didn't even bother to click through. But remember how we were talking about the Zen browser a couple weeks ago? Say, oh, yeah, we're switching from Firefox to chromium.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, I don't think that that's funny.

[Andy Inotko]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Not funny. No. And I am a Zen devotee these days, so it's working out nicely for me. Yeah, I really like it. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back with more news. This episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by very good friends of the show, people we've known for some time, Melissa. In fact, they've been around longer than we have. They've been a trusted data quality expert since 1985. And now, what's great about Melissa, even though they've been around now for 40 years, is that they don't Stop with the data quality improvement. They've now they've bought a couple of companies, they've added AI and I talked to one of their data scientists a couple of weeks ago. I was so impressed. Their AI and enabled data quality solutions do a whole lot more than just address verification. They leverage that that four decades of accumulated data knowledge with advanced machine reasoning, cutting edge AI. They take that raw address data and turn it into actionable, reliable insights for your business. By the way, a whole lot more than just addresses Melissa's ability to enrich and cleanse data. Think of it that way really as a data scientist in your pocket spans multiple industries. You'll see Melissa used in financial and fintech for things like know your customer and fraud prevention in healthcare. I was, I was blown away. They're using Melissa to match patient records to medications to actual images of the medication as it's being packaged to make sure they're getting the proper medication or the proper dose. Things like that. Government uses, Melissa education, real estate, the list goes on and on. Melissa's suite of verification and data cleansing services will benefit really any business that doesn't want to hire a team of data scientists, you got one with Melissa. Whatever rules your business operates within, Melissa can encapsulate them. Turn them into actionable software that changes your business. It's amazing. It's like having a data expert. Expert always ready, never sleeps. Melissa's intelligence systems can verify identity to prevent fraud in gaming operations. They ensure valid patient and medicine identification and healthcare systems. They securely update and verify constituent data across government databases. Know youw Business enables verification and monitoring for financial institutions. Melissa guides you through complex data management with ease making advanced data quality accessible to everyone from small businesses to enterprises. With real time data validation, comprehensive enrichment and cross reference verification. With the gold standard reference data. Melissa's always maintained you get intelligent anomaly detection. It's just no wonder Melissa is the trusted data quality expert worldwide. And incidentally, although it's not incidental to you, I'm sure your data is safe with Melissa. They encrypt all file transfers. They have an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, they're SOC2 compliant. You know all, they check all the boxes when it comes to data safety. I just want you to contact Melissa's team to find out what they can do to elevate your business, evolve your data quality. Get started today with 1000 records clean for free. Melissa, melissa.com/twit m e l I-s s a.comtwit they are your data scientist in your pocket. Melissa.comtwit we thank them so much for their support of Mac.

[Andy Inotko]

Break Weekly One quick update while we were recording Apple has finally re released WatchOS 11.4. So it's now whatever reason they pulled it is now solved. So now you can actually update WatchOS to 11.4.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting, huh?

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, it has that new breakthrough notifications turned off. So like if you've. You can designate an alarm as okay, I don't care if I've. If I put you in silent mode, this alarm I should break through anything like that. So that thing. I think that's the only breakthrough silent mode is what is called alarm option in sound and haptics.

[Leo Laporte]

Now that of course the phone has had that forever. I guess it makes sense that the watch should have it. Yeah, I don't sleep with my watch on, but I guess that makes sense.

[Jason Snell]

Apple wants you to. Apple really, really wants you to.

[Andy Inotko]

We can't save your life unless you're giving us more data.

[Jason Snell]

The sleep apnea works that way. The Vitals app works that way. Like they really want you to to sleep with your watch. Now I will say I have. I do. I got a series 10 and this was happening and I haven't written about it yet but I have this piece going around in my head right now called Sleeping with the Apple watch. Because that's what I've been doing for the last four months. Months. And it takes some getting used to because I used to charge like at a overnight and now I can't. So I charge a little before bed. I sometimes I forget, but sometimes I remember I charge when I'm in the shower. I try to do it that way. Here's what I will say. It's not that obtrusive and the data is interesting. I'm glad to know that I do not have elevated instances of breathing anomalies. So I don't have sleep apnea. That's great to know. But I will say that this alarms are great. I vastly prefer an alarm that is. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. A little tap on my wrist.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey.

[Jason Snell]

Much better time to wake up then.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially if you sleep with somebody. Because I don't want to wake them up. Right. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Well also, yes, that means that Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

Gets up really early.

[Jason Snell]

I can wake my wife up. Either. Either. Or I can choose to try to let her sleep because it's a private, you know, it's just me being bugged by it. I like that part of It a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

What band do you wear to make. See, I have a big titanium. I can't sleep.

[Jason Snell]

I generally am either wearing the knitted loop or a sport band.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have soft and rubbery.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, the rubbery one that came with it is all I remember.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I have some others, but I'm currently actually using the rubbery one that came with this. This is the sport band.

[Leo Laporte]

I've often slept with something soft and rubbery, but this would be the first time I do it with my wall.

[Jason Snell]

Hey O.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey O. Alex.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yes sir.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex. I don't know what that means. Alex, by the way, I tried in the same vein to convince chatgpt to paint me like your French girl and it refused. It said I couldn't generate that image because the request violates our content policies. You slime bag.

[Andy Inotko]

Did try French Canadian. Maybe that was it.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, yeah. It's funny that it would say no to that. That I could see it says, well, give me more information, but no. All right. Alex, you sleep with your watch on too, huh?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I love the. I mean, I have to admit that I've become a little obsessed with the health app in general. Like I just, you know, and so I'm just constantly paying attention to all these weird. You give me. The problem is you give me a bunch of data and my brain can't stop like processing the data. And so looking at how long I slept and whether what, you know, what kind of sleep it is and when I went to bed and when I got up and how I, and then I think about how I feel the next day and you know, and, and like what did I do beforehand? And there's just definitely lots of, I mean it definitely affects behavior, you know. And like I, it, it. I think that over, I, I don't know, I've been doing it for a long time now. I think that I, it, it also affects like my willingness, like I have a do not disturb that start turns on at 6pm and that came from the sleep app nap. Because I was like, I need time to not be talking about work, you know, and so to not be thinking about it and everything else so that I can slow down. I don't go to bed at 6, but, but I usually get to bed between 9:30 and 10:30 and I, and I, but I just need that time to like, you know, finish up whatever I'm finishing up, have dinner, do whatever else I'm going to do, watch tv, do, you know, whatever, have some time down and then get. And I did that because I was noticing how my sleep was all broken up. Because.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, and I was noticing, like, when I did that. And so now I just, you know, it's almost impossible to get a hold of me after six.

[Andy Inotko]

I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll just add that, like, a lot of, like, health and productivity problems either went away or were definitely partially addressed when I made it, like an absolute hard and fast rule. Eight hours of sleep every night. Whatever you have to do to make that happen, you have to make that happen. Because I was like, having a bad time for months and months and months and I had to like, look at. Okay, let's start with. Before we, before we, like, get blood tests and like, go to doctors, it's like, are you doing anything profoundly stupid that runs counter to known medical facts? And one of them was that, okay, maybe I'll get like four hours one night, maybe I'll sleep in 12 hours the next night. Maybe I'll get six hours. It's like, no, I have to like, start turning off screens and I will not have an alarm. I will basically sleep until there's an alarm that go. That will not go off until after eight hours. Because there is almost never any excuse for me not to get eight hours sleep. And that fixed so many things.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm not capable of sleeping eight hours, but I, but I not. Not usually. And so, but it's funny because it does over long periods of time. It says your average this year is 5 hours and 57 minutes. Your average all of 2024 was 5 hours and 53 minutes. You know, like, it's all like, that's about how long I sleep. You know, like, it's, but it is, but you, you get, and the problem is you get that data, whatever it is, whether it's your exercise, your, Your weight, your. And I think blood sugar will probably come eventually. All these things. And especially when you're tracking it over long periods of time, it gets super interesting. Like, you know, you see these huge patterns as opposed to things. And it's just that we've never had access to that kind of data before where you're, you have something you're always wearing is, is kind of just slowly. And I would never trust anyone but any other company but Apple. Not because I think Apple is good, but because I think, But I think privacy is part of their core business model.

[Andy Inotko]

And this is, and this is another area where Apple can really clean up with AI. I mean, Mark Gurman was talking about this during his newsletter. But the idea of like I would love to be able to give ChatGPT or Gemini here is my sleep data or here is other like heart rate data collected over the past month. Is there anything that I could be doing to improve my health or to improve my cognitive ability? And I'm sure that an AI would be able to do wonderful things with that. But would I trust I'm going to give medical data to Gemini or OpenAI? Gemini maybe. If I knew there was going to be a really great benefit. OpenAI almost certainly not Apple. Absolutely, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman's Power on newsletter this Sunday said the Apple's focus will be on health. He quotes Tim Cook saying in the long run, Apple's going to be best known for its health initiatives. Its greatest contribution to society will be in healthcare. He does mention that glucose, non invasive glucose monitor which is they've been working on, they say, Gurman says for 15 plus years. The idea originated while Jobs was alive, which is. Yeah, 15 years ago. To add a sensor to the Apple watch. It's difficult, right. He says Apple's health team is working on something that could have a quicker payoff. Project Mulberry. It involves a new revamped health app plus an AI health coach. That's kind of interesting. You know, remember, Apple might have a lot of ideas, but they have to get them past the fda. Oh, wait a minute, never mind. They don't have to get it past the FDA anymore. I don't know what the who was there at the fda? Anybody? Anybody? Most of them were fired yesterday, so. But I still think many got to get approval. Right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although health coaching may be a different. Right. Like there's a lot of non doctor features.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It says the service would be powered by a new AI agent that would replicate at least to some extent a real doctor. That's when you get in trouble when you give advice. Right. You know, you really ought to put a salve on that or don't worry, it's not cancer.

[Andy Inotko]

Every Apple health feature likes like afib detection, sleep apnea detection. It's not that. Wow, they finally had a breakthrough. It's like, no, they finally got approval from the FDA to be able to say we have detected afib. Even there they can't say here's exactly what you should do right now.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they very quickly get, you know, get. They step back pretty quickly, you know, like, you know, like, like I don't. If you're having anything that's odd. Very quickly, your phone, your phone will tell you that I can't tell you anything. You just need to call your doctor.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The company, Gurman says is training the AI agent with data from physicians it has on staff. They are opening a facility near Oakland, California, so physicians can shoot video content for the app. It's also looking for. Oh, gear. Oh, dear. A major doctor personality to serve as a host for the new service. Like Dr. Oz. Like, what?

[Andy Inotko]

When he gets fired from the administration, he's going to need a fallback.

[Jason Snell]

Maybe it's going to be, well, and.

[Alex Lindsay]

Again, I think that there's, there's, there's this kind of bigger picture of, you know, it doesn't have to be like, here's how to fix, here's how to sew up a wound or here's how to deal with, you know, an ulcer. But there's so many places where, you know, the vast majority of our health problems are systemic, you know, bad choices by us, you know, like, yeah, but.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the medical consensus shifts all the time on that stuff and anything that they're going to be allowed to say will be so anody is to be useless.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, you know, like, it can pretty easily tell. The thing is, is that we're starting to realize that, you know, everybody's different. And I think that the thing is, is that it. It having a bunch of data and then knowing, like, my, my wife can eat as much carbs as she wants. In fact, I think her, her body actually runs better. Like, she just, she just, she just feels better when she eats lots and lots of bread. And if I look at bread, I gain ten pounds, you know, like, and so it's. So I think that an app that starts to understand what you're like and where you're. You, it along with, you know, impacting if you look at recipes five years from now, along with the, you know, being able to, you know, manage a diet, manage fitness, manage, you know, what you're, you know, these other things. It can handle a lot of those things that are oftentimes just seen as too complex to deal with, you know, as a. And that's what Apple's good at, is taking complexity away from things that people just don't do because it would be too hard. Like, it'd be too, like, oh, I can't quite figure that out.

[Leo Laporte]

Herman says they want to get into food tracking, which would of course, course Sherlock. A number of apps. The new Dr. Lock AI agent will help users with the nutrition features. See, but again, consensus goes all over the place on this stuff.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I mean the bottom line is just don't buy anything in the middle aisles. That's the only food consensus that you really need then that hasn't changed for 100 years.

[Andy Inotko]

But part of this could be, maybe it won't be as complicated if Apple were to go in this sort of direction to become. I want. Apple's role wants to be a little bit more active and proactive in helping people get more healthy or achieve certain goals. Maybe it could be more along the lines of Apple Fitness, where it's like they're not, it's not an artificial intelligence chatbot that is, you're having a consultation with and it's giving you advice. More like by having such a broad and in depth view of the health data of all of its Apple Watch users, it knows what kind of video content it should be creating and putting in this channel and giving to people as resources of hey, if you're, if you're trying to get, if your goal is this here or if you, if you're, if you're, if your doctor has basically put you on like a heart medication for this, here are some things to keep in mind. Here are some stats to track. Here are some activities to try. That in itself would be very interesting, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Alex Lindsay]

All I was going to say is that, is that it doesn't, I think that it is not even just general. It seeing what you're doing. It can say you're not sleeping well and if you're tracking what you're eating, it's going to know what that is. And over time it can build very complex models about, you know, if it has all this data, it can, you know, everything. I mean, because it keeps track of your steps. When you just walk on your phone, you know, when you're like, I was talking to somebody who manages stuff. They said we know what your heartbeat is based on your pace. There's so much data that is there that's kind of floating around, but you don't want to share that with other people. But Apple can start to build a better model model of you, of your physical, like what you're sensitive to, what you're not sensitive to and just the way you move, it can figure out a lot of things, you know, especially when you're telling it a little bit of data that pins it in and then it start. And then, but then someone says, well, I want to lose, you know, I want to lose 20 pounds over the next six months, you know, and design me, design me a workout schedule, a diet that kind of thing. And, and, and, and it could do that.

[Andy Inotko]

GPT can do that. So yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I should point out that there's increasing evidence that the sleep trackers, among other things, are actually dangerous for people. They make them sleep obsessed, they make them anxious, they actually don't improve the sleep, they make the sleep worse. I think sometimes you could actually say too much information is not a good thing when it comes to your health. It makes you worry about things you shouldn't worry about.

[Jason Snell]

Although, I mean my counterargument might be that if you've got a really good sleep assistant or health assistant that's, that's machine learning driven and is sort of sitting between you and the data, that's among the things that it could do for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

It could say your sleep seems fine, don't worry about it. Instead of it, you just obsessing over the data. So there's potentially a place for something that's like an intermediary between you and your data so that you don't, you don't look at it and get obsessed with it. I think that's really interesting as a possibility that first we do, first what we do is build all the data and show it a simple data report and get everybody freaked out about the data. And then we build an AI agent that lays on top of the data and says don't look at the data. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They call it orthosomnia. And this is an article from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Are some patients taking the quantified self too far? And that's exactly the issue, by the way. 10% of US adults use a wearable fitness sleep tracking device on a regular basis and 50% of the rest would consider buying one. So it is a big business, but it does make people anxious. And in fact, it's been my own experience, it does not improve my sleep and it definitely doesn't improve my day when my watch says, oh, you didn't get a good night's sleep, you should be in a bad mood today.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah. My weird thing is I have never, with an Apple watch, with a Pixel watch, with a Samsung. Every time I've tested some device that's supposed to do sleep tracking, I have never, never had it give me consistent results. That's another problem, isn't it? I mean, I'm expecting like, okay, so I know I probably fell asleep at around 2 in the morning and now I'm awake and it's 9 or 10 in the morning and it will tell me no sleep tracking data collected or like you slept for 90 minutes, not like you slept for eight hours and only 90 minutes worth of it was any good. It's like, it's just so useless to me. I don't know why that is. Maybe I've just got furry wrists or something.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I find mine to be like laser accurate. Like when I travel and I'm like, I fly and pull a red eye or something like that, it shows all.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you compared it to another device? For instance, I have an aura ring. When I wear the apple watch in the aura ring, they do not agree.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know, it mostly just agrees with my experience.

[Leo Laporte]

I have had at 1.3 sleep trackers because I also had one in my mattress and it was three different results.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they're better now. I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

I guess I just feel like.

[Leo Laporte]

It just feels like it put on.

[Alex Lindsay]

My watch and my watch. It feels like it lines up with my experience, that's all. You know, it's excited when I'm traveling to watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't you. Don't you know that you're jet lagged?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, no, no. It's not, it's. It's the, the. It's the deep sleep versus the, you know, core sleep versus the, you know, and, and really thinking about what, what I'm doing to cause one. One thing or the other and just kind of generally keeping track of what I'm doing, I find to be very interesting, you know, like, and, and I find that my diet and what I do before the show, you know, what I do, the conversations I have, the everything else def into that, you know, and, and so I, you know, and I, when I stopped drinking caffeine, you know, in the day, that definitely made a, like, I just looked at how I was sleeping and I was like, okay, I really have to stop by 2. Like, you know, like not drink any more caffeine. But after 2:00.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. More to come. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Alex Lindsay, who sleeps like a baby. Jason Snell, who sleeps, breathes beautifully at night and wakes up silently. Andy Anaka, who's just too damn furry to do anything. And me, I'm Leo laporte and I always am having a crappy day thanks to my Oura ring. Notice it's on my middle finger. I'm not saying it. No, actually it's funny because they're now very hot. Everybody's got them and I keep trying them. This is the most recent one. And I keep Putting it aside, saying, you know, I don't think this information is making me feel better. You know what might make you feel better in the real world? Going to the doctor. Our episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you this time by zocdoc. A great way to find a professional medical professional when you need one. Now, obviously, obviously a lot of us are making excuses. I think it's mostly men. My wife always says this is why married men live longer. Go to the doctor. When was the last time you needed medical attention but pushed it off? Right? You rub dirt on it or you say, I'm so busy. Or oh, you know, it's going to heal on its own. I don't need any help. Look, we're all been there. Booking a doctor's appointment is, you know, daunting, to be honest. Thanks to Zocdoc, there's no reason to delay. In fact, you're going to love it. They make it easy to find and book a doctor who's just right for you. ZocDoc is a free app or a website. Start with a website. Zocdoc.com MacBreak you can search and compare high quality in network doctors. They take your insurance. You want to know that before you go, right? And then amazingly, you can click and instantly book an appointment. We're talking about in network appointments with more than 100,000 healthcare providers. And it isn't just MDs. You see, there's some dentists, there's mental health, primary care to urgent care. I've used it to find a gerontologist for my mom. You know, whatever specialty. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance who are located nearby. You can say how far you're willing to drive and are a good fit for whatever medical need you have dermatologists, psychiatrists, eye doctors, chiropractors. And then this is the best part. You can see reviews by verified patients so you can find a doctor that fits your style, your need, what you're looking for. These reviews are super helpful. Once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings. You can choose a time slot that works for you. You can click instantly to book a visit, no phone call now necessary. Plus, Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same day appointments in many cases. It's just nice to have the choice. Really a fantastic tool. I use it. I've used it many times. You should too. Stop putting off those doctor appointments. Go to Zocdoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated document doctor today. Zocdoc.com MacBreak Zocdoc.com MacBreak ZachTac yeah. Yeah. Don't you. I know you're gonna, you're smart and you're gonna go get the app. Please, just once go to the website so they know you saw this. Zocdoc.com MacBreak Then click the link to the app and that way they'll go, oh, yes. Oh, yes. Did they fix the turn on reactions alert? This is from a blog. Birch Tree. This alert must die. Matt Birch here and I, you know what, Birchler. Sorry, not ear ler. You know Matt.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice guy. Yeah, he's right about this.

[Jason Snell]

Smart guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Drives me freaking nuts.

[Jason Snell]

So what happened is there was this spate of things where people were like at their therapist and, and they were doing like, you know, confetti and fireworks and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And. And so now apps can say, I don't want those on.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Jason Snell]

And the problem is that Apple wants you to know that they're available. And I think the bug was that it's supposed to let you know that the app has turned it off. And you can turn it on if you want want one time. But at least in the beta cycle, it would never stop. And so like every time I would launch certain apps, they would, I would get that alert saying, you can turn.

[Leo Laporte]

On reactions if you want before every show. I get one now.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So because we're using the cameras for the show.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Annoying.

[Jason Snell]

I, I don't think I've seen it. Maybe they fixed the final. But I, I'm not for sure sure about that.

[Leo Laporte]

I just updated last night's. But I think they might have fixed it. I didn't see it this morning.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Because. And this is one of those things where people are like, oh, it's all a conspiracy. Apple's out to get us. And you know, generally it's probably a bug. Like the same thing where people are like, they turned Apple Intelligence back on when I updated. When I turned it off, it's like, it's probably not policy. It's probably a mistake. It happens. But yeah, it was. So it's interesting to watch that chain of events though, because it's like, I don't want accidental activations. And they're like, okay, you can turn it off, but if I let you turn it off by default, then the user doesn't know that they could turn it on if they want to. So let's tell them. It's like, okay, but then how often do you tell them? And it becomes this whole.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, how. You know, I just come on and I do two thumbs up and just wait there until something happens and nothing happens. That's good. That's what I.

[Jason Snell]

Good sign.

[Leo Laporte]

We had for a while, I think, John Ashley, right. We had. When we do what we're doing right now, we're using Zoom and then we use ECAMM for the editors. And the ECAMM's running on a Mac and Mac stadium. And it was putting reactions in, so I wouldn't. I wouldn't see the reactions here. Right. Am I right?

[Jason Snell]

I think so, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the chat room would say, oh, Leo, you did it again. And. No, it was.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, no, I remember that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was the Mac. Anyway, I think we figured that out. And this doesn't do it anymore. It's kind of. It was always kind of fun when the reactions happened, though, I have to admit.

[Andy Inotko]

Oh, God. No, that's the. I. The. I think that if. If there's any, like, video of me, like, on a stream, like, being incredibly angry, it's when, like, I just, like, made a gesture and suddenly confetti rains down. It's not like, oh, gosh, that shouldn't be like, I've got you.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently, they're saying in the discord that you triggered copious balloons or earlier, maybe that was for Apple's birthday.

[Andy Inotko]

I don't know enough. That wasn't. That wasn't me. I think I turned. I've got. I turned that not just off. I turned it the hell off.

[Leo Laporte]

Firework. Oh, there's some balloons. I just saw them. Because you turn it back on, though, Jason.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you can. You can. And you can manually turn.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can do it manually.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. All from. From that little. Not control center. From the little camera menu. Camera menu. Yeah, exactly. If you really want to do that, you can do it. It's very.

[Andy Inotko]

I mean, that's fine. I understand.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, the. Oh, I didn't notice there's a fog machine on that one. That's good.

[Andy Inotko]

And how come, like, we still have to wait for, like, the Max Headroom backdrop? Like, that's. That's the only one that I really want. Just, like, the intersecting colored lines on a black background that, like, shifts like the corner of a cube.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure we could do that.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sure. There's a way.

[Jason Snell]

It would be nice if we could do that.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a certain irony to this. So Apple got a lot of kudos from everybody except Meta. When they added the app tracking transparency setting. You know, the one that pops up when you install a new app and says, do you want to allow this app to track you all over the phone? And you say no. And Meta says $10 billion off the bottom line. France is now fining Apple over app tracking transparency. But there's, there's a big but. It's one of those things they didn't say you have to stop. And the fine was a measly, I don't know, 4 million francs, $16 million measly. From Apple's point of view, I don't.

[Andy Inotko]

Understand that at all. So like, you know, I mean, go ahead, go ahead, Jason.

[Jason Snell]

I understand. Okay, so it is perplexing. I kind of understand it in this case, which is Apple is. Apple has done something very simple which is app tracking transparency. And what's happened is they've gotten kind of out regulated by France which has said, ah, but, but these are the rules that you need to follow. And what that means is that like if you, if you answer the app tracking transparency question, you also still need to answer Facebook's questions about this and have its settings involved. And this is an ongoing trend now where the issue is not that Apple is protecting its customers because it is what, what the regulator in France seems to be saying is that it's added too much complexity. Complexity because there's the Apple alert and then there are these other alerts that come in from the, you know, from Facebook and that's too much. But to say, well, Apple, I'm going to fine you for protecting your users. It does seem kind of baffling. But I understand where they're coming from. It just seems really misguided because Apple is trying to be, you know, I think this is a case where Apple is trying to just make it real simple, dead simple, just like, do you want this or not? And the regulator is like, aha. But no, we have more. Ha ha. Because it's France. We have more complex rules and complex questions that we want to ask Apple get out of our way. And the result unfortunately is that a lot of these other things you get put in this dark pattern funnel where they want to lead you down the wrong path and you know, find a way to make money off of your data in some other way being Facebook, where Apple doesn't want that. So it's a, it's a very weird situation where I of understand where they're coming from. And yes, there is potentially added complexity. But like to, to say, stop Apple, you're fined for protecting your users is also just a wild thing to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the objective pursued by T T is not in itself open to criticism. The way it is implemented is either necessary, neither necessary nor proportionate to appreciated objects objective of protecting personal data. But what's weird, in 2021, Apple asked the French competition authority and they said, we cannot find fault in what you're doing. This is ahead of the launch. The authority chief, Isabel de Silva said it could not intervene just because there might be a negative impact for companies in the ecosystem. So it's just, I don't, I wouldn't blame Apple for being irritated by this one. Germany is still investigating. Remember in the EU it could be a much more significant penalty. In fact, up to 10% of global revenue, which is like, I don't know, what is Apple's global revenue? I mean that could be billions, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean 10%. It starts to get close to how much they're paying, how much they make in the eu. So they, yeah, they gotta be careful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like this is, you know, this isn't worth being senior. So. So I think that that's the, the challenge. And, and you know, the EU is far more, they care far more about trying to figure out why their businesses can't be more successful than they are about users. You know, like that's, that's what all these, this is, it's all about.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really them saying you're hurting our.

[Alex Lindsay]

Companies and their companies are complaining to them about, well, it's all these American companies that are beating up on us and how do you. And all of these regulations are all based on that, like how do we have. All are not very. And you know, and they have so many impediments to being successful that come from their own governments that I don't know if they, they really can be competitive in the environments that they're in. So.

[Andy Inotko]

And also there's another factor is that the, there was an article in the Financial Times a few days ago about how like the EU is like quietly like planning to not to enforce DMA and other laws against American companies, but not to be aggressive regarding fines because they want to tee off the American executive administration as much as they possibly can. So that's sort of insulating them from a lot of the fallout from a lot of these things. So 10% off of everything, 10% of their entire revenue is probably never going to happen, but it's going to be, it's always going to be a calculus of how much can we find them. So that we are enforcing this law in a meaningful way, but not in a way that will cost Tim to fly down for another chicken club sandwich at Mar A Largo and complain that, hey, we need an airstrike against Brussels because we don't want to pay this fine.

[Leo Laporte]

What is Apple's response to the new Utah App Store Accountability act that was signed into law last week by the governor? So we've talked about it before. It's now the law. Have they responded negatively to it?

[Jason Snell]

In my mind, it's the same story which is, is Apple has a plan and a system that they think is the right one in terms of how you deal with verifying the ages of the, the users of services and the, the various legislative bodies and regulators disagree. And so you end up in this weird position where Apple may be forced to do things it doesn't want to do, but also that are potential essentially not great for its users. In the case of the Utah law, it's this idea. Yeah. That we've talked about here that Apple believes that if you want Facebook to know that you're the right age for certain kinds of content, that Facebook should ask. And what the state of Utah is saying is no, Apple and Google, as the App Store providers have to ask, they have to keep that on file. You know, and Apple's like, we don't want that information. We don't want to pass it on to other people. You know, we, we really do not want to be involved in this process. And I understand it from a, you know, I don't want to spend the time and effort. I get that part. But I think that they, they also make a privacy argument that.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Jason Snell]

That, you know, you don't necessarily want to be in position of providing personal information to other parties.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson had such a good suggestion and I wonder if Apple might consider doing this. He, he said the best way to do this would be for Apple to allow a parent to enter a birth date into the phone of the year.

[Andy Inotko]

100%.

[Jason Snell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Apple. So Apple doesn't know that birth date or doesn't know anything about it. And by the way, the parent could enter whatever it thinks is appropriate. So the parent could say, well, my 13 year old really is as mature as an 18 year old. So I'm going to say she's 18. Or my 15 year old is as mature as a 9 year old. So I'm going To say she's 9. Because the parent is the only one who really knows what's appropriate for the child. And then the App Store could just go by that and say this can't be installed without giving up any information. No verification is needed and if a parent doesn't want to participate, they don't.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, I agree. I think the only solution that makes sense, that does the least amount of damage and solves the greatest amount of problems is for an app to simply get a yes or no answer from the device saying that is this app appropriate for this user and not have to know the gender of the. Of the user age or anything. Just is this appropriate? No. Okay, then I won't show this content or I won't allow this app to allow this, allow a new account to be created on this app.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder why Apple doesn't implement that. It seems like that would be a great solution that would get it off.

[Jason Snell]

The hook all around. While they may be forced to do that now, they also there was that talk about the API that would allow the apps to query an age range and not a specific birth date, which is such a great idea. Idea. The idea that Facebook could ask like is this person over 15? And Apple would say yes or no, but that it wouldn't give personal information. It's a great idea and it keeps.

[Leo Laporte]

The power in the hand of the parent where it belongs because the parent gets to decide what the emotional age of the child is and there's no need for the parent to prove that he or she's an adult, which this Utah law would require every Utah user to hand over age information.

[Andy Inotko]

I honestly think that if there some sort of industry coalition that decided that this were a good idea, then Apple would happily join that coalition and contribute to that coalition. Similar to the way that they were happy to put encryption into their support for RCS as soon as there was like a blueprint for the actual standard to happen. I don't think that they'd be terribly interested in creating a standard that would just be another conflicting standard that may or may not be deemed acceptable to a government entity or supported by Instagram or any other app. But this is an area where I think the industry needs to get together and decide that here is where world legislative intent is heading. Here's how we can head off problems and actually create solutions. Not just head off liability for ourselves, but actually create a solution to a problem that is on a lot of people's minds, not just legislators. I hope that happens because again, there's a. As much as we can make very valid arguments about privacy, there's also, I think there is agreement on at least some level that there is content and apps that should not be available to kids or a parent who's involved in their kids lives should have the ability to basically have some oversight. And there's always nuances there but on a broad level, level I don't think there is uniform agreement that a kid is just like any 28, 29, 30 year old iPhone user and should have access to absolutely everything without oversight and without restraint.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I also think that at some point we have to realize that we might not be able to make a law about everything. Like there are things that should and shouldn't happen and sometimes we're not going to be able to like this. The, what we're seeing in the eu, what we're seeing in all these states is like there's got, you know, the, for, for lawmakers, you know, they have a hammer and everything's a nail. Like every, everything that's wrong in society we have to write a law for. And I just don't know, I just don't know if our lawmakers are technically equipped mentally to be able to write these laws. Like they just, they, you know, they are, they're not, they have no idea. Most of them don't use email, you know, for a variety of reliability reasons, but they won't, they don't use email. Most of them spend very little time on the Internet. They have kids with almost no life experience experience advising them. And, and I'm, I speak from experience, not from things that I wrote that I read. You know, like so, and, and they, and they just, they just have a bunch of crazy ideas in their head that come spilling out into laws, you know, and I think that it, we just have to be, you know, I think that at some point you're just not going to be able to fix it all by writing another law like. And I think it just makes it more confusing and, and more messy than what it was before.

[Leo Laporte]

The next generation of Apple's CarPlay. Any takers? Anyone? Anybody? Apparently not. Apple touted Porsche as being one of the companies that was going to implement next gen CarPlay. But it is not in their announcement.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have to say that I rent a lot of cars and I think the number one resistance from car makers is they can't compete with Apple's interface. And the issue you get into is if they keep on letting Apple install it, no one's going to want to use the one that they want to charge their users for that. They, they really have this idea of charging and their interfaces are just, I can't say the Word on the show. And so, you know, and. And you just like, who thought this up? Who thought that this was okay all the time? Like, you know, like, like. And. And so then I'm like, okay, I just need my iPhone to just do the thing. Like, I just need, like, just stop. And so I think that the. The problem is that, you know, Apple is better at this than they are. And I think they don't want to put these things. I mean, all of their interface, I have not sat. I have not been in. I'm in a lot of different cars, not been in one car where I thought the interface was remotely competitive to what I have in CarPlay. And that's whatever the version is for the last five years. So they're just so bad at it because the problem is that they aren't trying to build a product. They're trying to build a product that's serving a whole bunch of things that don't include the user. Like, how do I sell you on things? How do I make sure that you have all these other things? And it's this mishmash of all of these things. And how do you know instead of. They don't have a clear vision. And Apple tends to have a much. Tends to be much better at clear vision of what they want to give you on these kinds of interfaces. And it's just so frustrating to use a car without CarPlay because they're. And if I can't connect for some reason my phone to it, I have a suction cup in my thing. I can use the LED wall LED screen as a nice smooth surface to. To suction cup my phone to it and just call it a day. But it's just really. They're not good at it. They'll never catch up with Apple. And the problem is if they let Apple in, their users won't want them to. They won't want to go back. Like, there's no.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you. The car manufacturers want the data and they don't want to give Apple all that data. I have a BMW i5 which actually has a hybrid solution that works quite well. In fact, I live in the BMW interface, not the. The CarPlay interface. I can go to the CarPlay interface quite quickly, but I get a nice hybrid combination of stuff from BMW and Apple and it works quite well. And I use Apple Maps and all of that stuff. So I think it is possible. BMW i5 does a very good job with it, but most don't. I agree. In fact, Teslas don't even allow you. To use CarPlay, you have to Bluetooth your phone to the Tesla. Tesla like a, like an animal, right?

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah. I don't, I'm. The thing is, like, maybe part of what's throwing them off. I do agree with what Alex is saying is that in an ideal car maker's world, they would have full control over that center console and the data that goes through it. However, another part of that is that what value are you giving to a potential customer who doesn't have an iPhone, who has like an Android phone, who wants Android Auto? So are you basically adapting? Are you. Basically. Does the next generation carplay make it just as easy to. Whatever screens are built into those devices. Excuse me, into those cars.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good. Can you use Android with that? Yeah.

[Andy Inotko]

The big magic show demonstrations of the next generation carplay is that the dashboard is one continuous piece of glass. And Apple, Apple is putting up the speedo, they're putting up the tac, they're putting up everything. And a. I don't know if that's going to be flexible, if they will again. And if you. I don't want Tim to basically be answering a question to your Q and A and say, well, I'm sorry that your mother's car doesn't work with an Android, maybe you can convince her to like get an iPhone instead.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, looking at this, I agree. I don't think I would want, want this in my car, to be honest with you, because it is so Apple centric and that raises a great issue. The cars that don't allow you to use Android Auto are off my list for sure.

[Andy Inotko]

And also cars, automakers, they have accomplished designers as well at the exact same level of Apple. And do they want to say, no, we're not going to design the user interface for our users. No, we're not going to design instrument clients, clusters and positions. We're going to allow an outside company to have that, to have that level, to have the sole access to that canvas, as opposed to. We want to. We have our own style, we have our own idea of what a car interface should look like. So there's a lot going here. I don't think it's just that they don't want to give up power. I think that the best situation for consumers is to simply say, yeah, we will support anything you want to do. Or given that the two biggest players are car pay and Android Auto, we are not going to make any decision on the design of this car that makes it more difficult to use one platform over another.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's sensible and I think that's what's happened. Aston Martin and Porsche both previewed next gen CarPlay vehicle designs in late 2023, but neither has released it. Apple announced this in 2022 at WWDC. So it's, it'll be, you know, three years ago. Yeah, I have a feeling it's not going to happen.

[Jason Snell]

I don't think it's going to happen. I think, I think that they're, I think the carmakers unreasonably think that their cars are your more your most important personal device when it's your phone. But I think reasonably they think that they would like to control the car experience. And I think where carmakers get confused is when they say, well, we aren't like GM did, we aren't going to put CarPlay or Android Auto in our, in our cars because we're going to. You, you should use our cars and use apps in our app store. And it's so stupid because, because I don't care about your car. I care about the apps on my phone. I want to use my podcast app, not whatever podcast apps you make available on your car. My phone is my most important device. It's always going to be my most important device for everything except driving. That said, you know, there are lots of things that integrated cars offer like you know, electric cars, they've got maps. The maps are attached to where you're, where you can charge. They do things like preconditioned batteries, like there are reasons why or anything Lane keeps keeping self driving features, all of those things where it really is part of the car and it's not part of your phone. So I feel like the right thing to do is really to say we've got our part, Apple's got its part. Find ways for your phone and your car to talk to each other, not do things like ban carplay. But what Apple tried to do here is say, hey, let us help you. And I think the truth is most carmakers say we have to do this ourselves. Not just because, oh yeah, we want to charge people for our connected package and all of that. Although there's some of that going on. Part of it is like, well no, it's our car and these are car features and they don't belong to you, they belong to us. You stay in your box. Whereas Apple was thinking like, let us help you. You don't understand user interface and maybe they don't. But I think if I was an automaker I would say we need to, we can't just Seed this to Apple and we can't make it that our UI of our car changes when you have an iPhone nearby. So you know, there's a nice center path here. I don't think the new CarPlay is it. I think working with car manufacturers to find out ways that you can get your car closer to your phone in ways that are good for the user, that makes sense, but not more than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Analogous to what's going on with smart TVs. Smart TV interfaces are universally God awful, especially Samsung's, but they still, you know, even if I use an Apple TV they supersede the Apple TV until I finally get out of the Samsung interface and get into the Apple TV interface. But they make, they make money on it, so they're going to keep doing it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I mean I think that the, yeah, the pro. It's not that they don't have good designers because they've got great designers. They have the best. They have the money to do that. It's that they have too many missions. And so in most of those missions, you know, every bad design is usually has an accountant somewhere behind it. You know, like, you know, and of someone trying to like, how do we graze some more money off of the user? How do we, you know, like, I mean, I think a lot of car manufacturers really want a subscription service. I mean they sold me a car 10 years ago, I'm still driving it, you know, they didn't get any more money from that, you know. And so, so they, you know, getting me to pay $150 a year or whatever would be a lot of money for them, you know. And so, and I think that, I think also when Apple came out with this, they were still rumored to be making a car that is a huge problem. And I think that that was them when they launched it. I think that they were like, oh, you're going to take all the data, figure out how our cars all work, make one better. Because they could. Like that's the thing is it was scary is Apple could, if you give Apple all that information, it could make potentially a better car. Didn't end up making it a better car, which is why it stopped, they stopped working on it. But, but I do think that the, the, the problem again for the car manufacturers, they have too many, too many missions and a lot of them have to do with making money. And, and same thing with the TV screens, which is why like mine is just an Apple TV. Like it just goes to HDMI 3. I don't have any, like, I Don't. It doesn't.

[Jason Snell]

I don't interact with my, the different, the differences that a car between a car and a TV are great, though, in the sense that there are lots of things that is a car function that you need the car to do and that the phone, your phone isn't going to do, and therefore you either need to do what the new CarPlay was trying to do, which is sort of allow the, the, the car data to break through Apple's interface in various places. And, and, you know, again, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to say, though, there are things that we need to control because it's like the speedometer and our driving package and car charging planning. Like that. It's like, okay, fair enough. Where it verges into ridiculousness is when the car manufacturer says, oh, no, we have to build a wall between you and your smartphone because we, not only is it like, no, everybody's going to love listening to podcasts on our podcast app instead of their phone. It's madness, right? It's like, you would never think that, but they're like, but we want to optimize for revenue and we want people to pay for our package. I was like, all right, so you know what, what should happen here, and I don't know if it ever will, is there should be an extension of CarPlay that continues on that is not the, the quote unquote new CarPlay, but is like an extension of the existing CarPlay which Apple's working on, that, that lets the carmakers comfortably use what Apple wants to provide while also doing what they think they need to do in a way that lets the user have the power. And that's the thing that is at the core of, of this that we're all talking about, which is where this gets bad, is where one company, honestly, whether it's Apple, they're not doing this, but whether it's Apple or the carmaker says, we're more important than you. And, and that, and that is like the GM decision about CarPlay is GM saying, no, no, no, it's going to be great because you're going to, you're going to have to use an app, a podcast app that we approve and a music app and service that we approve. And it's not going to work as well as the one on your phone, but it doesn't matter matter, because we approved it and it's got a stream via the cellular subscription you need to pay us for. And if you want to use your phone, you can, but you're just going to have to do a Bluetooth thing and it's going to be dumb and you're not going to be able to control it. And like that's when the car companies lose their way.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Tesla story by the way. Let me show you the BMW interface and I think this is the key is that cars need to have bigger screens and they're getting them so that they could put CarPlay. CarPlay looks beautiful there. You don't have to have CarPlay there.

[Jason Snell]

And that's actually a new feature. Leo, we didn't even talk about is the big new CarPlay feature is, I think they added that like a third row for giant CarPlay screens.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great. Cars should have these big screens. I can switch to a BMW interface here on this screen. The driver's screen does have components both from BMW, like how much energy I'm using but also from Apple with maps the directions show up. There's even a heads up display where Apple maps shows turn by turn. So BMW has decided let's integrate, let's allow you to use Android Auto or CarPlay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

In conjunction with our stuff. They do have a whole page of stupid BMW apps. I never go to that page.

[Jason Snell]

Sure, but you can, I mean, yeah, that's, I was just, I was just using a CarPlay interface on my mother in law's car this weekend and it's a Toyota. And you know that's the nice thing that Apple has done where their, their stuff is integrated into CarPlay where there's like a Toyota app. Right. But all it is is the thing that takes you to the, the car menu Instead of the CarPlay menu and you can see the stuff there. And Apple has been adding over the years, we all get caught up on this CarPlay new CarPlay stuff. But Apple has been adding support for multiple different shape screens in dashboards for a while now. And that's the nice, that's, that is the wave of the future is for a car maker to say oh yeah, I guess, you know, if I've got this screen here and this big screen over here I can, Apple can have that if they want. That's fine, we'll let them have that plus the big screen and like I can just work together because you know that's, that's, you should be working together to make your customer happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, exactly.

[Jason Snell]

That's what you should be doing.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well and I have to admit that I, when I pulled my, for my car, when I pulled the tuned, you know, old radio out and put. This all happened because my headphone jack, like of all things, my headphone jack didn't work. Like, you know, so, so my wife has a much more advanced car. I have an old car that's like a truck, like a beat up truck that is, is a van. And, and I, I pulled it out and I started, when I started working with all the wires, I was like, what I really want is just something that has a USB C in. You know, like I just want a flat plate that holds an iPad that I can just drop down and just have it do all the things. And because all those interfaces are there, like how it talks to my, my steering wheel, the surround, all the things are in those little wires hanging out on the back of that stereo. And I started thinking what I really want is just something I slide a little mount for my iPad and it just does a USB C in and then we'll call it a day and I can just, you know, and, and I don't. And, and I'm, you know, thinking about it, you know, like there's, there's, there, there may or may not have been some 3D prints of these, of, of something that slides in there. But I, I just feel like a lot of people, I think as car manufacturers keep on going down this path and I see this talking to my, I don't know if, you know, with my kids at least they're, there's this kind of, they, and a lot of their friends are starting to pull back from social media, from their tech. They want foldable phones, they want, you know, like they're, and I think that there's this. As the companies start to keep on trying to turn this crank of. I want to grab onto all the things that you're doing and they're not very good at it. I think you might see a lot more pushback. Like I have no interest in buying a new car. Like, I just like, it's so like all this stuff has me just go, oh, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

But you do use email, right? Or do you have somebody print out the emails for you?

[Alex Lindsay]

I use email. I use email. I, I, I respond to it slowly. You know, I do, I check it, I check it. I have, I check it a couple hours apart. I don't check it regularly. It doesn't do any, I sometimes go.

[Leo Laporte]

Several days with that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not very responsive.

[Leo Laporte]

I must text. Text.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm super responsive, you know, like, so there's a text discord, those kinds of things. I'm like very tied into. I hate email. Like I just.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Mac Break Weekly with a man who hates email. Mr. Alex, Lindsay, Andy and Ako also here. He loves sideburns and the prisoner, but he is not number one, just to be clear about that.

[Andy Inotko]

Be seeing you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, be seeing. Be seeing you. Not yet. Stay here for a moment more. Jason Snell is also here. He is saluting like an emoji. I know how to salute from an emoji now.

[Jason Snell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. Y.

[Jason Snell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I also have bags.

[Jason Snell]

Bags under your eyes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Alex Lindsay]

In the driver's seat. I mean, at this point, you know, it's one of the biggest. You know, all the big sports are. This is a money maker and they have all these streamers with all this money to get them into a bidding war just seems to be obvious. Like why would you stick with any contract you did a couple of years ago in the current environment? Because what everybody wants is big live.

[Leo Laporte]

Sports, biggest audience ever for this year's Super Bowl. Yeah, it's interesting because Google of course bought Sunday Ticket, which I pay for a lot for on YouTube TV, and I think it definitely is a driver to YouTube TV. But that's, that's just one part of the whole puzzle. They don't mention Google in this story, which makes me think Google's more recent deal is still locked in past.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think, I think that is a maybe a. And it's not a. It's a rebroadcast deal, not an initial broadcast deal. Right. It's not the same. It's Kind of a repackaging. These are for the, these are for the broadcasts. The, the player, by the way, that's not mentioned in the existing contracts that the NFL has dealt with in the last year year is Netflix, which did those Christmas games.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jason Snell]

And Netflix is just sitting there. And they're not currently an NFL partner and they have lots of money and they really like live events now.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, this is going to be expensive.

[Jason Snell]

And advertising. Well, it is going to be expensive. But you could argue then that Netflix is the one that could benefit the most because they have the greatest audience. They have the largest audience of any, of any streamer. And, and they have an ad package. Plus all their subscribers get ads for sports, not just the people on the ad plans.

[Leo Laporte]

So just wrote an article.

[Jason Snell]

They want them in there too.

[Leo Laporte]

What did you call it? Descending into the ad. My unsuccessful journey into Netflix's ad tier.

[Jason Snell]

I lasted one show on the ad tier. I couldn't take it because I've been ad free for everything but sports for the last 25 years and I couldn't take it anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

You haven't. You have to build up your ad immunity over a period of time.

[Jason Snell]

I can't. Also, they miss. I mean, they also did a bad job with their ads. I mean, let's, let's just face it. They had a prestige show like Adolescence, and the ad load in it is stupid and it's in the wrong parts of the show. And what are they even thinking there?

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, Adolescence was probably made without ad breaks.

[Jason Snell]

It was certainly made with. It's all shot in one shape.

[Leo Laporte]

Much of it's shot in one take.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, entirely shot in one take. So you throw Netflix in the mix and then you throw somebody like Apple in the mix as well. And here's the truth of it. The NFL, for people who don't know people outside the US or people who don't pay attention to sports on broadcast TV land. Last year, 90 of the hundred top rated events of the year on television were NFL games. And the previous year was like 98, other than like the Oscars. Like, seriously, this year was a little down. Not because people weren't watching the NFL, but because there were a bunch of presidential debates and stuff that, that also draw. But NFL games are the number one bankable draw in the US and so everybody is a, is a partner. And that's really good for the NFL because then everybody is a media partner. They get lots of money, but they also have this control where they basically, you know, if you have A big media outpost. You are in business with the NFL, and that's good, but it also gives them a little bit of control over you and the money starts to flow. So that's the question is, does Netflix come in? Well, does Netflix try to take over for a traditional broadcaster or just get a special. And does Apple make a run at some aspect of this? Because, again, it's a really good business to be in.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. And there's, you know, there are lots of different ways of slicing this up. The broadcasters have been slicing this up for. For years. You know, where the. Some get these games and the other ones get those games, and some get Thursday night. Well, Amazon's got Thursday night now, but the idea is that the NFL has been pretty good at kind of divvying these all up to diversify, risk and to make sure that everybody's all involved in this process. But I think that. So it's not like it's going to. It probably wouldn't be all Netflix or all Apple or all Amazon. It could be.

[Jason Snell]

It could be everybody.

[Alex Lindsay]

It could be more partners. Yeah, yeah. And it could be. We're just going to stream. You know, the question is, how exclusive do they want to get? I mean, how exclusive do they have to be? Also, you know, because, you know, now we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I also have an app. Right. Plus, they have their own streaming.

[Jason Snell]

They do. For some. For some, it's sort of in market. It's complicated and international. But that's, by the way, their biggest.

[Leo Laporte]

Problem, isn't it, that it's complicated?

[Jason Snell]

It is. Well, yeah, but no, their biggest problem is it's complicated. They're there. But the truth is, it's not so complicated that they aren't the king. And they.

[Leo Laporte]

127.7 million people watch the super bowl maximum.

[Jason Snell]

Maximize their revenue. Right. Like all of these things are happening. And to Alex's point, like a couple of things. One, they are. They are at 17 games, headed for 18. They're going to do an increasingly large number of games outside the US they could literally do a full schedule of outside the US Games with various visiting teams as they increase their schedule. So that's interesting from a scheduling standpoint in terms of timing. And then what I would say the thing to look at that I'm interested in is NFL rights. They've added Sunday night and Monday night and Thursday night and Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the core rights that are currently split between Fox and cbs, the whole they date. That concept dates from an era where there were three broadcast networks In America. And you had like two channels in every market that showed NFL games on a Sunday. Well, they don't have to do it that way like that. I know that that's been there since Alex and I were watching and you were watching Leo. We were little kids watching. It was like it was on two channels. But they don't have to do it that way. They could have the rights. They could bring in another player. They could play on other days, even more days than they already do. They could have different time slots like, and trust me, the NFL knows that and they know what maximum can maximize the whole schedule. So much inventory because there's so many teams that they will, they can and will. And this is the problem with college. The rise of college football is like if college football crosses the NFL like they did this year when they, they put one of their playoff games on the date of an NFL playoff game when the NFL told them not to. Like the NFL could bury them because the NFL is king. And so they will go into every slot they can and maximize their revenue. And so it could be a really big deal when this all comes up.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, they, they, I think that the, they could also just go, well we're going to have everybody broadcast these. You know, like they don't have to give any, any, they could, they could just give all the services all access to all of those things and probably charge and then say the SERP for the services. They say, well, you're all on your own to figure out how you promote us. Right. You know, so, so the thing is, is that they could, it could just be cross broadcasted across all those things and they could probably charge each service the same amount that they're making now and just 4x everything that they're doing in front of them. And the services wouldn't like it, but they'd still pay for it because it is so lucrative. And they'd have to figure out then what they'd have to compete for is how they add value to the brand. And that would be very complicated and super competitive and super good for the NFL. Not necessarily good for the brands that are involved. But I think that you have three players really. It's Netflix because they have so much scale and Apple and Amazon because they have so much money. Like they don't really, they can bid into something that doesn't even necessarily turn.

[Leo Laporte]

They have multiple upsides. They don't just have to sell advertising.

[Alex Lindsay]

Kaiser so many other things, you know, like, you know that they don't have to make money on this project, you know, and so, so there's so many places for them. I, I think the other, I think the broadcasters are out. Like I don't know how they compete with the streamers. Like there's not, they're, they're on their, they're, they're not doing well now and it's only going to get worse if they have to compete against teams.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason have influence in that. Do The San Francisco 49ers get to say we got to have a local station?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean the owners are the ones in charge here and so they, they all know that they want local tv. Local TV is not going anywhere. In fact, one of the reasons the NFL is so successful. But Talex's point, if, if games weren't available on CBS and Fox, let's say what they would do is what they've been doing all along, which is, is they put any game that's not on local broadcast, the local team is in. They put that game on local broadcast. So you could be in a scenario where there are a whole bunch of games that are only on Prime Video or Netflix, but your local will be on your local station.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I was surprised with the Amazon deal because those Thursday night games were only on streaming and I thought no, the locals were doing.

[Jason Snell]

If the Kansas City Chiefs are playing The San Francisco 49ers on Thursday night on Prime Video, it's on in Kansas City and San Francisco. Francisco. Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

If it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say Amazon got great ratings. It was very successful. And so the fact that everybody else in the rest of the country had to watch on Amazon did not seem to deter the audience particularly.

[Jason Snell]

It's a pretty good deal to launch.

[Alex Lindsay]

The app and, and, and we hope that people invest in it. I mean, because Amazon's about two years behind YouTube. I mean if you look at the YouTube ticket, if you actually like the, the player is so much better than Amazon's player that it's that, that it's, you know, so we hope that, that they stay you.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean March Madness is going on right now. They say the TV ratings are surging to a 32 year high despite no Cinderellas. It's mostly chalk so far. I don't understand sports talk, so I don't know what any of that means.

[Jason Snell]

The number one seeds all won. It is sports is the thing bulwark against like it is. It used to be what was on TV was our commonality as a culture. And the fact is most of that is now on demand and shifted and not part of our commonality, but sports is not everybody' a sports fan. But all that stuff happens live, and you need to watch it live Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Rating since 1993 for March Madness.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that part of it's gambling, too.

[Leo Laporte]

So a lot of it's gambling. The NFL knows that, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

A lot of people are watching because they have something at stake. You know, like, you know, like, you know, it's true.

[Jason Snell]

But I would also say that you can be a sports fan. I like, I don't gamble, and I'm not interested in watching sports that's not live. Right. Like, I'm just not. Oh, no, it doesn't really matter.

[Andy Inotko]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I tried to watch some Giants games because I missed them live, and it's like.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's delay. I mean, they make. MLB has a great product called the Contents Game that lets you watch the whole, like, good parts of the baseball game in 20 minutes, which is awesome. But, like, it's different.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as a baseball game should be.

[Jason Snell]

It's an extended highlight reel instead. But. But, yeah. So anyway, this is. This is the challenges. How do you get a communal moment? And other than those things, like presidential debates of the Academy Academy Awards, most of it is sports. And that's why, while everything else is kind of going down, the NFL rights, the college football rights, the college basketball rights, and the all the huge NBA rights deal that NBC signed, these are all. That's why. Because also, from the other side of it, if you have a broadcast TV network, as those businesses have descended, like, what is left for them? And the answer is sports. Sports is left for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Not even news sports. All right, I'm sorry to all you nerds who are going, what are they talking about? They smart. But let's talk about something nerds care about. NaNoWriMo is shutting down.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I. Okay. So sorry. Sorry for taking over this part of the show, but.

[Andy Inotko]

No, no, no, you are the expert.

[Leo Laporte]

First, explain what NaNoWriMo is.

[Jason Snell]

NaNoWriMo, there's a guy named Chris Beatty who came up with this idea that he thought was funny, which is he and his friends would write a novel in the month of November. It's one of these, you know, it's like a stunt of do a thing in a month. And they did that for a while, and then they decided to kind of popularize it, and they ultimately set up a nonprofit. And. And the idea there was to provide a platform for people to come and say, I'm going to do it, and to log their Words. And then they built up some education resources so it could be taught in classrooms. And it just kind of went from there. And they built community forums. It was a very kind of like early to mid mid 2000s idea. And I was on the board for about, I don't know, five years as Chris Beatty was getting out of it. He didn't want to do it anymore. After like, I think the first year I was there, he had enough of me. No, he just was tired of doing it. But it kept on going and they, they said they're shutting down. I haven't been affiliate. I don't know if I even know a single soul over there anymore. They had a couple of scandals. They like last year, a lot of people were really angry because they had a sponsor who, who was like AI related. And a lot of people in the creative community obviously are really angry about the idea that, you know, you could use AI to help you write a novel or something like that. And previously they had had a community scandal where I'm not, I'm even hazy on the details, but my understanding is there was some bad behavior by some people who were there, kind of municipal liaisons. And it showed the, it showed the limitation that a, a nonprofit can do for something that's a giant community community, a web based community thing. I think the truth is, and I can tell you this from my time on the board, that was a difficult, difficult nonprofit to run because the concept is just out there, which is write 50,000 words in 30 days. That's not a thing that you need anything for. And, and even when they provided a platform for you back in the mid 2000s like today, it's totally unnecessary. You can do this anywhere. There are tools to track you. It's a concept that's out there in the world world. They tried to make the world a better place by building a lot of educational resources. That was really nice. But the truth was it was all small dollar donations by people who were like, I did it and I'll give you $10. And it's hard to sustain something like that, especially when I feel like it got less necessary over time. And then the moderation part of it, we're going to have a bunch of forums and we're going to set a bunch of in person meetings in various cities and all of that for a little nonprofit to do that. It was not something that was ever really a great thing. Long term. You throw in a couple of these scandals that even if, even if they weren't, you know, necessarily a huge Deal. It's enough to diminish enthusiasm among parts of the community. And if you're relying on the community for small dollar donations to keep your lights on, that's not going to work out. So it's too bad. But the good news is it's not illegal to write 50,000 words in 30 days. There will be plenty of websites that will tell you how, encourage you and let you track it. And I encourage it. I wrote three novels. That's awesome because NaNoWriMo did it. And before you say yes, but if they're published, if they're not published, they don't matter. First off, lots of first time published novels. Novelists have like eight novels in the drawer. And it's how they learn to become novelists. And no other thing gets punished because you do it for pleasure or because you do it for practice. You know, if you think it's dumb to write an novel, if you're not a professional novelist, I recommend that you go down to your local basketball courts and yell at all the non NBA.

[Leo Laporte]

Players who are playing basketball or the painters or the. Anybody else. No one will ever hear me in public, I promise you.

[Jason Snell]

Yes, but it's. You can still do it. Why, why play the piano, Leo, if you're not going to be a professional piano player?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a pleasure.

[Jason Snell]

So it's a shame, but, but the concept lives on. And you don't need a website for that. You don't need a nonprofit forum.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the focus though on the negative events, the moderation in its forums and the AI takes away from something. A nanowrimo spokesperson said. Kilby in a video. Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free. And I think that that is kind of maybe the fundamental moral of all, all this is so much has been provided for us on the Internet for free. And it turns out we learned it wasn't free, it was attention based, it was advertising based that people stopped paying for things. And I think it's an important lesson to be learned. I mean we can keep doing it, but it's a shame that it couldn't continue.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I agree. I mean I think that the problem always when we were doing it was what do we have to offer? Because the fact is it's fairly easy to do a word tracking thing and you can have a self organizing community that says, hey, in my town, we're all going to meet at this cafe and we're going to write during November. You don't necessarily need it to be blessed by some central organization. And that was always the challenge with them. So really what it ended up being was, this is a fun idea, and if we turn it into a nonprofit, we can maybe do some good with it in, like, in education. Which is. I think one of the great things that they tried to do with the. With the money that they raised was keep the website going, keep the community going, but also put that money into educational resources so that teachers could take the month of November and do creative writing projects with their students. I think that's awesome. But in the end, yeah, the Internet, I mean, this is the funny thing, it's still the Internet, but the Internet of 2005 and of 2025, they are very different.

[Leo Laporte]

Very different.

[Jason Snell]

And. And for good and bad, I think.

[Alex Lindsay]

That you have to figure out what your value proposition is and why it's different and what. And a lot of times people put something up and they go, okay, well, it's cool. We made this all there. And they're not really paying attention to what makes it so that someone looks at it and goes, wow, I can't really. I couldn't do that. Like, if I look at. I have to admit, for me, if I go to art and I see art that I can't do, which is most of it, I'm like, wow, that's amazing. If I see something, though, like a square on a piece of paper, I'm kind of like, I don't know. And I feel like a lot of times services people build and put together, when they first put the square on a piece of paper, it was amazing. But at some point, people are like, I could do that myself, you know, And I think you have to figure out how you're providing something that is that people clearly understand the value that they would be getting if they. If they put money into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, in the same period of time as NaNoWriMo has been around, the NFL has raised $186.4 billion. So I guess the value proposition of guys with helmets and pads hitting each other is higher than that of people like Jason writing a novel.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's really hard like. Like that. But I think that's a good. I think what you're pointing out to is a really good example of, you know, you. You have these. The most athletic person that you ever probably met in many cases was the quarterback for some high school football team. And then only one out of about 10,000 of them end up at college. And then they still have trouble finding just 1 out of 28 to be good at football, you know, and that's just one position. And then you take all that value and you put a bunch of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, there's only one Stephen King, my friend. I mean, it's hard to become a great novelist as well.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh no, it is, it is. You're 100% right.

[Leo Laporte]

Not nearly as rewarding. I guess that's the point. By the way, no truth to the rumor that Movember is going under. I think you could still grow a mustache.

[Jason Snell]

You can still grow. I mean that. And that's the point, right? Is like it was a weird thing to have a non profit for because it's literally just a thing you can do, right? And so they tried to make the best of it. There are some education and I want it. I, I really believe that like running a marathon or something like that, like setting yourself a goal to write creatively, any writer will tell tell you if you don't do it every day, if you don't do it, you know, you will get rusty and you need to kind of like keep working at it. And so saying you gotta write 1600 words in a day, it can unlock your creativity. It can make you think of yourself as a writer. It changed the way I look at the structure of novels that I read now because I can see how they are assembled in a different way than I could when I hadn't written three of them. And definitely as a person who is a professional writer, having being reminded of the practice of it, that, that you need to keep doing it and that it gets better, it gets easier actually believe it or not, when you keep doing it, but when it's hard, you still need to do it. That's a huge lesson to learn. There's so much great stuff about the idea of saying it doesn't matter where it goes, if it goes nowhere, if nothing comes of it, to say I'm going to write 50,000 words in November. Because you will learn a lot about yourself and about how stories are told and about how books work and so many other things. And then the last thing I'll, I'll say for a pitch of this as a practice is the lesson you learn from NaNoWriMo is don't get too precious with your words. As, as Andy classically says, one of my favorite Andy and not go isms, what you want to do is keep pushing the cursor from the left side to the right side. And that is the job of being a writer. And so you don't when you're trying to hit 1600 words a day. What you don't do is write 400 words, think about it, delete them, and then write another 400 words. You just pass power through. Because any professional novelist will tell you, editing is for later. Get the words down now. And NaNoWriMo teaches that lesson really well, which is just get it out if it's not good enough. You know what, don't worry about it. You'll come back later maybe and fix it. But just get the words down. Because so many people, the roadblock to writing is that they, they write a sentence, think it's not good enough, delete the sentence, stare at the cursor, and then they leave. It's like, just keep writing. Keep pushing that cursor forward like Andy says. And that's a huge part of being a writer.

[Andy Inotko]

Writing is not finishing the first third of something and getting it perfect. Writing is finishing something and it's awful. That's what writing is. Because the vomit draft is what you work with. Editing is writing. So it's like you don't get credit for, oh, I had this great idea and I wrote the first chapter of it. Like, great. When are you going to finish it? Oh, well, I'm still polishing. No, you've got nothing to polish. You have to have the thing finished.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a great line from the. There was a wonderful four part documentary of Saturday Night Live and one of them was about the writers room. And I think it was Julia Lewis. No, it was Tina Fey who said, what we're doing is vomiting. The goal is to pick the chunks of corn out and get them into something. I'm sorry for that image. I apologize. We're going to take a little break. When we come back, I would very much like to get your picks of the week. Gentlemen, prepare. And for those of you who are watching the show, you know, note what happened to NaNoWriMo. We are not a nonprofit and we do have advertising, but most of the profit goes into paying these guys, paying the editors, keeping the lights on and the Internet bills and all of that stuff. And fortunately, advertising does cover, you know, about 90% of that. That still leaves a pretty big chunk. And that's where you come in. If you like the shows you see, if you want to see more of them, if you want us to continue to put the shows together as we've done for the last 20 years, I would love to get you into the club. Club Twit is the way to support our enterprise here. It's. We keep it inexpensive. Seven bucks a month for that seven bucks. I think we give you some good benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this pitch because you'd be a member. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is where a bunch of really cool people hang out and have a great time. Not just during the shows, but we talk about everything. There's, you know, anything nerds are into, including yes, Sportball goes on in the Club Twit Discord. So it's a great hang. It's my favorite social network. You also get access to the special events that we do. For instance, Thursday we're going to have a photo segment with Chris Markwaard, our photo guy that actually I guess that's Friday. Let me look. We have all the events scheduled here. Is it Thursday? Yeah, Thursday, 1B PM Pacific. We'll go over our photo assignment. Brilliant. Chris has been giving us photo news and stuff like that. It's great. We're coming up still Micah's crafting corner at the April 16th. We're going to do another coffee event with Mark Prince on the 18th. He's bringing along Liz. Happy Beans. I guess we'll be talking about coffee beans. And there's that AI user group. I missed it again. Darn it. But I will be there. Friday, April 25, 1pm I have to write it into my calendar. Calendar. That's the key. And that's been a lot of fun too. Anthony Nielsen, our AI guru, started that. So all of this to say it's a club of people, like minded people who are interested in technology, who listen to the shows and who want to support what we're doing here at TWiT. We really appreciate your support. TWiT TV Club TWiT if you're interested. We really appreciate it.

[Jason Snell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's get our picks of the week. Jason Snell, why don't you kick things off?

[Jason Snell]

Okay, well I think I'm gonna go with a repeat from a couple years ago because it's still out there, it's still free. And we've been talking lately about the issues involving like Amazon shutting off the USB side loading hole from Kindle and like how do you get things on your e reader or your phone or wherever you want to do them. And I just want to put in a plug again because I think I did this like in 2023 and I want to do it again. There is an app called Caliber. It's at I think caliber-ebook. Is it org does it come caliber-ebook.com and it's free and it's an ebook library app that will convert ebooks into other ebook formats. You can take Mobi's from Amazon and put them in in on your Kobo. There's so many things you can do with it. It will be your library. You can read in it. There's just so many things you can do with it. So Caliber there is also a third party DRM plugin or DDRM plugin you can, you can get that will strip DRM from a bunch of common formats. And I'm not saying it to pirate the books, I'm saying to put them on other devices to move them around.

[Leo Laporte]

I moved them all my Kindle stuff over to my Kobo because I, I own those books, don't I? I think I do.

[Jason Snell]

I. I mean they might say you have a license to it, but I think morally if you bought it you could put it. You should be able to put it anywhere you damn well please. And Caliber helps you do that. The DDRM plugin, you can search for it. It's gone through a few versions now. I have a Kobo. I also use a plugin called Obok which is Kobo Backward you literally I can plug in my Kobo and if I've got a DRM ebook on my Kobo I can suck it back into Caliber with the DRM taken off of it. Because again if I want to put that on an Android based reader or anywhere or just read it on my Mac I can do is the definitive ebook utility and I highly recommend it's free, it's open source, it looks like it, but it's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it looks like it, but it's really good. Yeah, I agree. Really fantastic. Everybody who has ebooks should have caliber. Calibrebook.com Good pick Andy and Iko Pick of the week.

[Andy Inotko]

Mine's something I'm sure everyone's heard of, but I finally bought one recently because of the Amazon sales. It is a simple USB like power meter power tester. When I first heard of these a few years ago the good ones were like 50, 60, $70. The inexpensive expensive ones look like crap but they seems to be seems to have like settled on a. On a single OEM design that's now like 10 to $15 and loaded with features. All you do is you put this on the end of USB C or something else and it will just simply show you like what's going on in the charge. So it'll give you here it's telling me how many volts it's drawing how many amps. This also has multiple displays so it can show you also what the temperature of the battery is. You can get another page that shows you a graph of how the amps and how the volts are changing over time. It's super super useful because there's so many times when you really need to know what's going on. For instance, when I got it just last week, again, I knew these things existed. I didn't know exactly how you useful they were. I have this, I've had this adapter for ages for my Android phone and for my iPad. It's a simple little dongle that breaks out data and charging so that I can actually like plug in headphones to my iPad while I'm charging it. But I've always, I've always been concerned like. But does, is, does this have the right wiring so that if I, if I connect like a fast charging charger to it, will it still charge fast or will it charge slow? By plugging this in and plugging it through exit, Yep, it's still, it's charging 40 watts. That's what it should be doing. Things like, I brought props today. Things like, here's one of my favorite little like Bluetooth speakers. I don't know how much it draws when it charges. Whereas I have like these wonderful anchor chargers that I've recommended before where depending on how many devices you have plugged in and where you've what you've got them plugged in, it might get 100 watts, it might get 40 watts, it might get 12 watts. I know that. Okay, this only draw. Now, I know this only draws about 10 to 12 watts when it's charged. So I don't have to worry about putting this on the same charger as I've got my MacBook on right now, because I know that between the two of them, they can still both charge fastest as possible. And finally, like, I've got a bunch of things inside the house that are. They just don't work anymore. And for instance, I have like a rechargeable light that stopped like charging. I've got one of my favorite little pocket cameras, my, my little Panasonic Lumix LX10, which won't really charge up. You want to know, is the thing dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, or is it charging? The charging circuit is working. The device is trying to charge the, the battery, but there's something wrong with the battery and it's not charging quick enough. So for instance, I found out that my camera is working. It's alive. It's not as though the CPU or whatever has fried or something. There's something wrong with the battery or the contacts that's just not. It's only charging at 0.01 of an amp, which is rather, rather low. Whereas on the light, this thing will not even light up at all which means that it's totally inert. It's doing absolutely nothing. So we're at the camera. Might be worth trying to fix. The light is probably just completely gesturing. And at least it's worth tearing it apart to see if there's anything obviously wrong with it. So, like I said, these are really, really good. I put in the show notes the DIY more USB C power tester, because that's the one I got. You'll see like a dozen, two dozen different makers, different sellers that look exactly the same way as this. I chose this one because the price dropped to 10 bucks from 15. I had some Amazon store credits that needed to be used. And also it was just kind of time. And now I've realized, oh, I should have bought this a long time ago because it's just a cool thing to have, like, inside your bag. Because there are times when, like I said, you just need to know what's going on. Is this. Also things like. Lastly, things like the charging speed and the charging profile changes as the device gets more and more fully charged. Not everything that you're trying to charge will have like a series of five LED lights. You can't. And you also can't, like, for instance, have your MacBook plugged into a wall outlet like at a. At the airport or whatever, and tell you how far along it is to charge. You would have to open it up and then unlock it to find out, is this fully charged? Can I take it off the charger? Whereas by looking at this and saying, well, when I first plugged it in an hour and a half ago, it was charging at 40 watts, now it's charging at like 5. That means it's at barely the end of its charge cycle. And there's. I can. It's probably 90% or more. Like I said, easy thing. A lot of great use for 10 bucks and a lot of different ways to use it.

[Leo Laporte]

So thank you, Andy. Awesome. Pick of the week. Alex Gibson. Alex Lindsay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Alex Gibson. That's my new name. Yeah, exactly. So last one wasn't that expensive, but.

[Leo Laporte]

This one is only 3860. That's.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I'm obsessed with surround sound now. If you look at the. We didn't talk. We didn't have an Apple Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't do a Vision Pro segment today.

[Alex Lindsay]

But there's. The update went out and so the new spatial library's there. And one of the things that you start to go through spatial video and immersive video is that you just realize you need more surround the audio makes a huge difference. And so I'm going down this path of. I'll probably every once in a while pop up with another one of these. Like, hey, I found another mic. Because people who, anybody who's doing what I'm doing, doing, you have to pay attention to that. And so what I'm. This is, I'm taking this to NAB and this is how I'm going to cover nab. Well, part of what I'm going to cover with nab, this is a bicycle. It looks like a bicycle seat.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, it doesn't look that big on the website. That's huge.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's not like a little, not like a little mic. The objects may be closer than they appear.

[Leo Laporte]

So it looks like a bicycle seat?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes, yeah, it looks like a bicycle seat. Now what it has is, it has a little, it has. It's actually a 5.5.1 microphone system.

[Leo Laporte]

So don't sit on it.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, yeah, don't sit on it. It's very expensive to sit on it. Yeah. So it's got a, you know, a little mic input or 3, 8 or mic input here and then it's got a little connector here. Now that connector basically goes in and comes out as just standard old XLR. So this is just 5, 1. Like we're not trying to calculate anything, figure anything out. It's five mics that are. Or six mics that are coming out that are, that are here. And so you just plug this into your mixer. So what I'm going to be doing is plugging this into my mixer, mixing that and delivering it actually to a live view with all of the tracks embedded into it. So it'll be, when I stream to YouTube, it's going to be a 5.1 mix, leaving the live view, you know, and not have to do any other processing like we do with Ambisonic. And it's, you know, this is about as high quality 5.1 mic DPA makes. DPA is the company that makes this and they make some of the best mics that we use.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good mic.

[Alex Lindsay]

These are really high quality microphones. But I, you know, and what I'm interested in, of course, is to use it with. I find that when we do event coverage and we start to include more of the surround, whether that's binaural or 5.1 or other things, you just feel more like you're there, you know. And so that's what we're going to be experimenting with. We're doing some, something A little bit. We'll be streaming on Sunday only. So Sunday will be the day that we stream with the backpack with the live view wandering around. And we'll be experimenting with taking. Still having people with handheld mics. But those hand, those, those will be. Those handheld mics will be just in the center track and then we'll have the surround there and we. The way we have it set up, we can control the mix between the two and, and the 5.1 makes it a lot easier anyway, so I thought I'd show it. It's kind of a fun little. A fun little microphone and we'll talk more about maybe in the future. We'll talk, maybe show some examples. But I, I will be streaming from NAB on Sunday. On Sunday for a couple hours in the afternoon. So stay tuned. Just keep your eye on our, on our, on our Web, on our YouTube page.

[Leo Laporte]

Dpa5100 mobile surround microphone 3000 and I.

[Alex Lindsay]

Didn'T know this existed until like three weeks ago.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really cute. It's what you need though.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So Officehours Global, I guess that's the big story. NAB's coming up this weekend.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I'm going to be speaking, I'm moderating on Saturday and then talking about remote presentation as and so on, so forth at the bea. So this is the Education association and it's kind of a secret that no one knows that you should know about. It's on Saturday, so it's not going to be on the regular day. It's on the weekend when you have lots of conference stuff. Bea, basically it is. It's all educators, it's all. And there's one little track hidden in BEA that is all spatial audio, spatial video, video. You know how to get the most out of your remote presentations. And so I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be there. So if you look for me, look for me in the schedule. You only need an Expo pass, which you can get if anyone's going to nab. You know, hopefully you've gotten the email from some company that says you can have a free Expo pass, but you only need a free Expo pass. So it doesn't cost you anything to go. And it is, it is the. I don't know, I mean, I just feel like it's. It's the track that I will sit in. I'm not a big. When I'm not speaking, I'm not a big track goer. But if you look at this here, you'll see that there's all these tracks, but the ones that are hidden in here, like spatial and immersive video for classrooms. You have drones and immersive experiences, and this is all one that doesn't cost you anything. It's kind of the secret set of tracks. These are all tracks here. So there's, there's lots of them. But I'll be speaking in the afternoon there. So if you're interested to meet me or see me, talk about remote presentation BEA 2025, which again is in the west hall. And it's again, I'm just surprised that no one knows it's there. It's the coolest collection of talks that are there. I'll sit through all of them in the morning and then speak and then go back into the audience and sit and watch the other ones. So it's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy Inotko, I know you're getting close to launching your anatko.com I saw a plea on Blue sky for input.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, I'm, I'm now working. I've got all the details now worked out, and now it's just basically a choice of if people want to support my blog with money, how can I best serve those people, make them feel loved and welcome? And is $130 a month too much to ask for and or is a dollar a month too little to ask for? Somewhere between those two, although somewhere in.

[Leo Laporte]

The range there, I also want, if.

[Andy Inotko]

Someone wants to give me $130 a month but not expect, not expectations, hey, I'll take it. Thank you. So, yeah, so there's a lot of. I'm nearing the, I'm nearing the final, the final push here. I'm very, very happy, very excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy is on Blue Sky I H N A T K O if you want to respond to his feedback request. His most recent.

[Andy Inotko]

Yeah, I'm just looking for, like, what do you, what do you like about memberships? What makes you feel loved? How much do you, what do you feel is value? Or you're just saying thank you for doing what you're doing here is some money. I'm not expecting any return, but I will take the podcast anyway. Thank you, whatever that sort of stuff. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. And you're getting a lot of response, too, I see, which is great.

[Andy Inotko]

Good. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason snell [e-mail] yes, sir. And of course his podcast are sixcolors.com Jason, anything you'd like to plug, my friend?

[Jason Snell]

Let's say we continue the parade of guest stars on the Upgrade program on Mondays Dads.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

Guest dads, not ghost dads. That's different. And we're not talking about him. Guest dads every week. And talking about tech with. With people I know who I don't normally get to talk with usually is kind of fun. And so every Monday while Mike Hurley's on paternity leave, we're doing that at Relay FM Upgrade.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. There it is. Making more of technology. Thank you, Jason. Thank. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Alex. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our Club Twit members for making the show possible. You can watch us do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream on Live. Live on eight different platforms. You don't have to watch us live, but you can, I guess is the point. Especially if you want to chat back at us. Club members are watching in Discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, Tik Tok, XT, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So there's plenty of places to watch. But you don't have to because after the fact, you can also download the show at Twitt TV MBW. There's a link there to our YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share little clips. And of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Just look for Mac Break Weekly audio or video. And if you will, leave us a review when you do because that really helps us generate more interesting, more activity, a larger audience. It's probably the single best way we can promote the show. So your help is much appreciated. Thanks for being here everybody. We'll see you next week. And now it is my sad and solemn duty to say get back to work. Break time is over. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.

[Jason Snell]

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