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MacBreak Weekly 970: Too Little Jam Over Too Much Bread
Rumors of Apple's Next Vision Pro
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Alex, Andy and Jason are all in the house. They have an interesting theory about this Financial Times article. Apple says we're going to start making all our phones in India. Really? What's wrong with Siri? And how come Perplexity could do it better. And yes, Apple says, or at least somebody says Apple's going to do less expensive vision pros this year. Is that possible? All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 970, recorded Tuesday, April 29, 2025. Too Little Jam over too much bread. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news with these fine gents, Bandy and Otko, visiting us from the Boston Public Library or some library somewhere.
- [01:07]
Andy Inotko
I am showing support for the library system by exploiting its many wonderful resources.
- [01:12]
Leo Laporte
It was independent bookstore day on Saturday. I bet you went to a bookstore and picked up a comic or something.
- [01:20]
Andy Inotko
I actually went here and bought some books.
- [01:23]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that counts. A library is as good as a bookstore. Better in some respects. Also, Alex Lindsay from Officehours Global. Hello, Alex.
- [01:33]
Alex Lindsay
Hello. Hello. Good to be here.
- [01:35]
Leo Laporte
You spent independent book day on camera all day, probably.
- [01:39]
Jason Snell
Yeah, sure.
- [01:40]
Leo Laporte
Knowing you, knowing you. You know how it is. And Mr. Jason Snell from sixcolors. Com. I am Groot.
- [01:52]
Jason Snell
I am putting my. That's actually a St. Jude thing, but he is Groot. Like, that's the fever fighter. I am revving up my colors. I am making sure all of the colors in the ink tank are ready because there's going to be some Apple results.
- [02:06]
Leo Laporte
When is that? When is the one? Is. When it. Thursday. Wednesday.
- [02:09]
Andy Inotko
Thursday.
- [02:09]
Jason Snell
Thursday.
- [02:10]
Leo Laporte
Thursday. Good. So by next week we will have many colors.
- [02:14]
Jason Snell
Oh, man, there'll be so many charts for. What do you think?
- [02:17]
Leo Laporte
Going to be a rough.
- [02:19]
Jason Snell
Use my charts. I don't. It's a mystery. I think the quarter is going to be fine. I think the question is what's the guidance going to be like? And how. How are they going to be able to dodge all of the tariff questions? Because, you know, they want to dodge them all.
- [02:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [02:30]
Andy Inotko
Without. Without getting into the. Into the. In the show. They sold a lot more iPhones and other devices this quarter than they thought they were going to.
- [02:38]
Leo Laporte
Because all of a sudden.
- [02:39]
Andy Inotko
So this. That's good news.
- [02:41]
Jason Snell
Yeah, they're going to mention that. Although. Although some of that is going to spill into the next quarter because, you know, they spend, you know, a few weeks compiling the numbers before releasing them. So I, that is going to actually spill, but they're going to have to talk about it. And this is the lesson that I think we've learned is they don't want to give anybody any ammunition in terms of how they're dealing with politics and international politics and all of that. And so it will be interesting to see how they spin it. So, yes, Thursday we'll hear and then feel free to use all my charts next week.
- [03:11]
Leo Laporte
Apple stock, I don't know how important that is, took a dive early in the month when the tariffs were announced, but recovered mostly not entirely over the remaining few days.
- [03:22]
Jason Snell
I think there is some degree of confidence that Apple and the administration have an understanding about this. Of course, nobody really knows, but I think that there's a sense that we're just sort of diving it in, into it here. But like there's, there's a sense that something is going on, which is why Andy put it in our show Notes like, Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Tim Cook. That's basically like, what did you say to the president? Which I can't imagine, like that anybody is going to ever really respond to that. Like, what are your privileged conversations with the White House about this?
- [03:58]
Leo Laporte
Like, I can pretty much guarantee Donald Trump does not have a taping system in the Oval Office.
- [04:03]
Jason Snell
You would think not.
- [04:04]
Leo Laporte
He would have, he's learned that lesson.
- [04:06]
Andy Inotko
Only Putin has a taping system in the Oval Office.
- [04:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, very good.
- [04:12]
Jason Snell
I was thinking maybe, maybe like Baron is just there shooting video all the.
- [04:16]
Leo Laporte
Time for my TikTok dad.
- [04:19]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's lots of, there's, I think the problem is there's, there's lots of people having conversations with Trump. Tim just is the only one that's affected. You know, it's, it's not like other people aren't trying. He's just the only one winning. So.
- [04:32]
Leo Laporte
Well, we don't know yet. I mean, that's, the automakers got some concessions yesterday. So, you know, everybody's going to get everything. Everybody's going to get something.
- [04:42]
Andy Inotko
Look, he got the Apple got carve outs, but then they got taken back. And Trump specifically said that, no, we're not making exceptions for broad exceptions. Course, who knows what he was on that day. So his mind changes from day to day. But I was going to say fluid.
- [04:57]
Jason Snell
It's the, it's also kind of who's the last person to talk to him. But I will say this. Although he likes his economic advisers that he's got and all of that, I think Just little armchair psychology that he likes cozying up to business titans, titans of industry. They make him feel like a business titan.
- [05:16]
Alex Lindsay
Right.
- [05:17]
Jason Snell
Which he certainly thinks he is, as well as being the president. He's his peers titan.
- [05:21]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [05:21]
Jason Snell
And so if there's proper, kind of like proper etiquette, proper fealty, whatever you want to say from business titans, going against the business titans strikes me as something that he's less inclined to do. Even if the economic advisors are like, no, be tough. And then Tim Apple walks in and says, you know, business, business where you're killing our business. It's a great American business. I think that's the method that they're using. But, you know, it's so random and chaotic that nobody really knows what's going on. I, I suspect that reports that Apple is doing some stuff and making some changes. They're investing in America, they're moving some stuff to India, they're doing all this. I think that's all, you know, going to be taken as evidence that, that they're doing something in response to what's going on in Washington. And part of me thinks that that's what they, that's actually what they wanted. The White House is just to feel like they've, you know, had that impact and made them, you know, change their business around a little bit. But I think the power of being a, a big business and a CEO of a big business does go a long way. And it's not just Tim Cook, I do think it's the auto execs and all of that too, that, that I think Donald Trump is inclined to listen to CEOs and because he fancies himself a business guy himself, fundamentally, and that even his economic advisors, who are like academics. I just think when push comes to shove, he's probably gonna believe the business people and not his, you know, his advisors.
- [06:50]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, but this is why I'm glad that Elizabeth Warren and others are not necessarily putting pressure on Tim Cook, but keeping that conversation active.
- [06:58]
Leo Laporte
I don't think the implication is that some under the table deal was made.
- [07:02]
Andy Inotko
Well, just that. Well, in addition to that, which is unfair to all the CEOs who don't have a million dollars to donate to an inaugural table or table or whatever. It is exactly what Jason said, that every time Trump says, well, I've been talking to Tim Cook, parentheses, my fellow extremely successful billionaire businessman, head of a businessman, and he says, and we agree on this point, every time he gives Trump legitimacy, that maybe on some areas Trump has not earned and the damage that, that will do is real, although it's going to be hard to enumerate until for years to come. So that's why I'm glad that some pressure is continuing to be put in and wisely.
- [07:47]
Leo Laporte
Apple is not waiting for concessions. The Financial Times exclusive story that they are aiming to source all US iPhones in India to avoid. I mean there's still tariffs in India, I think it's 26% but it's not 145%.
- [08:05]
Alex Lindsay
And I think they're also, they are, they've been moving for a while and this just simply turns the volume up in some ways I think it gives them cover. You know there's. If they just are just moving out of China, China's like what are you doing? But if they're getting these huge tariffs they can be like, well we can't help.
- [08:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they probably wanted to move anyway.
- [08:22]
Alex Lindsay
So in many ways cover.
- [08:24]
Jason Snell
This is the way it to. Right. If something gets resolved between the US and China later, it'll be harder for them to do this. So put this out there now. I have heard a theory and I think that there is some legitimacy in this that that FT story might be planted as a way because it sends a signal of like, look what we could do. We're just going to do this thing, we're going to move all this to India. Also many people, I think definitely Mark Gurman and at least one other person reported like this is not possible, there is no way for them. And Gurman was like, not only is there no way for that level of volume, US volume to come out of India next year, but when you're looking at a folding phone for example, and that super thin phone that are on new production processes, even more unlikely that you'd be able to build those outside of China. And then related and I thought this was really interesting. China is apparently now slow playing the export of products that are used to build factories and assembly lines because you know, they're not preventing it but they don't love it and they don't want to make it easy. So there were reports about how, you know, you can't just build a factory and a lot of the precision tooling and machinery is, is made in China or the, the things you use to build it are made in China. And those have been going from like one week turnarounds to four month turnarounds where you just, it goes in a black hole. And there was one report that was amazing. I think this might have been Gurman. There was a report that, you know, somebody Made like a shell company in Vietnam, sold the equipment to Vietnam and then in Vietnam it was accepted and then immediately shipped to Apple in India. So, or Foxconn, which is building the, the phone. So there's a lot of, a lot of moving parts in terms of Apple and China and the US and manufacturing. But, but yet this FT story comes out and just says, oh, they're just going to move it all to India. I mean, is that meant to shake people up? Because the experts sort of say that it's unlikely to be true. But yeah, very interesting.
- [10:24]
Andy Inotko
Tata is already, the Tata plants are already at capacity. They're going to have to build immense new facilities in order to fulfill that goal. As Jason said, India has been doing an amazing assembling phones that are not the, not a brand new manufacturer. And so it's unlikely that they're going to have the capacity to build a super thin phone, to build, to assemble a folding phone anytime soon. On top of that, Foxconn for a couple of months now has been saying that, look, China is making it hard for, for us to ship equipment we need into India. They're making it hard for us to move personnel that we need out of China and into India. And then the third problem is that China, China is a ginormous market for Apple for sales. It's not just the company that manufactures everything. How far is Apple willing to go to honk off the Chinese government by blatantly saying, yeah, well, we're going to be removing manufacturing capability from you and try not to, not to give you quite so much business. Apple is already having huge problems competing with Huawei and other locally owned Chinese businesses that are assembling phones and building phones. So there's a lot of variables in this calculus and we don't know the ball is still in spin. And it's hard for Apple to make a decision knowing that, look, the decisions we're making today will affect us five years from now, and five years from now we're going to have a different president or we're going to have a country that's in such a state of disarray that we want to be in the business of hoarding food and toilet paper as opposed to manufacturing luxury phones. So we don't want to build ourselves, remake ourselves in a form that's going to be obsolete five years from now.
- [12:10]
Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that the other thing is this also plays in the Indian market. So, so, you know, when you're saying we're bringing all this stuff over, that's helping the Folks there that are negotiating any kind of, you know, all the other things that have to happen. There's a lot of negotiation. India to build anything. So, you know, not saying, not saying, well, we're just giving you the little phones but we're actually going to move everything here. You know, as a planted story, it works great. You know, has the right amount of clouds over. Look what we could do has the right amount of like shiny ob. Right amount of, you know, shiny object for Trump. So these, it's a good, it's a, it's a well planted article. I think that, I do agree that it's probably been leaked on purpose.
- [12:50]
Andy Inotko
This, and this is also the week that Tim, that Apple and Tim Cook leaked. Excuse, not leaked, excuse me, released an Indian based study about how much money, how many millions and billions of dollars are being fed into the Indian app developer economy through the App Store, both to chase after antitrust actions that are kind of pending in India against Apple and the App Store where they are pending pretty much everywhere there's an active government, but also basically saying that we are invested in India, we are contributors to the Indian economy and to the Indian populace. Let's continue to dance and sing together because we love the music that we're making together.
- [13:31]
Leo Laporte
So Foxconn has one plant already in India. I mean Apple's been doing this for a while partly because of Indiana, India's tariffs, ironically.
- [13:39]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it's, I think it started there. But also I think that the, the constant drumming of by 2027 or 2028 Chinese, you know, the Chinese are supposed to be ready to invade Taiwan. You can't take that completely. Like that's the, that's the, the official goal of the party. So, so the, so when, when the, when the party's saying that, you have to take it seriously. And I think that Apple has to. Every company manufacturing something in China has to have a plan B by 2028. You know, like they just have to have some other way to make stuff where it doesn't go to zero. And so, so India and Brazil and others, I think it started because of the import duties or the, or the import rules. But I think that it also is, is being, it picked up speed because of what China's saying, which is dumb. Like, why would you, why do you say that in public? And then, and then the, and then it picked up even more speed because of the tariffs.
- [14:33]
Leo Laporte
It's hysterical because. In his Power on newsletter on Sunday, Mark Gurman said. I had that story. I had that story. I had a story early in April. I had that story as first reported here on Power on in early April, he points out, which is, as far as I know, accurate, that Apple makes can could make roughly a third of the annual US iPhone demand in India. Now that's why they have to build two new factories in order to do that. One would be the second biggest iPhone factory in the world. Of course the parts still come from China, but that does avoid the big tariff of importing an entire phone from China.
- [15:10]
Jason Snell
Exactly. And we don't know what demand will be like if the tariff regime continues. Right. Like this may be an easier bar to clear if demand for iPhones goes down because the price has to go up. But the goal here is to evade as much of a price hike due to tariffs as possible. And you know, but I think Andy and Alex make really great points like we don't know what's going to happen. You could spend billions of dollars on a factory and then the winds could shift and suddenly it's more just to build it in China and not India. Yeah, absolutely.
- [15:43]
Leo Laporte
He says, and I think what you were saying, that while Apple's manufacturing in India has reached parity with China in terms of the current iPhones, the 20 year anniversary models are extraordinarily complex. They'll require new parts and production techniques. And of course the folding phone would, as would, I suppose, the ultra slim phone. Yeah, so he says, certainly not by the year 2027.
- [16:08]
Jason Snell
But one thing that I will say about that is you could still build your cutting edge folding phone in China because nobody's seen that price before.
- [16:19]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [16:20]
Jason Snell
So if the goal is to more or less maintain existing price points, and we know Apple loves maintaining price points, they've just spent what, three years getting MacBook Air back down to 999 because they really like that price point. And that's true with the iPhone as well. But a new phone, it's like the iPhone 10 came out and it established a much higher baseline price for the iPhone and they've maintained it ever since. So the one advantage here is you're building a folding phone in China. Nobody's seen it before, nobody knows what it costs and they can set a price that's new and that includes some amount of tariff in it and say, well, yeah, it just cost 2099 or whatever and that's just what it costs. And it won't be the same. Like they will have, I think, less concern about doing that, especially for a cutting edge model charging a load for it than they do taking your mainstream iPhone 17 or 18 and jumping it up two or 300 bucks.
- [17:19]
Leo Laporte
And as Joe in our Discord points out, even if you're assembling in India, if China invades Taiwan, you still have a big problem because all of the.
- [17:27]
Alex Lindsay
Parts, again, you got to do things in parts. So the first thing you do is get the factories there, then you get, you know, get all your machinery there, then you slowly keep moving pieces out.
- [17:38]
Leo Laporte
This could take many, many years.
- [17:40]
Alex Lindsay
But, you know, the best time to start was 10 years ago. The second best time is today, you.
- [17:45]
Jason Snell
Know, so TSMC has that factory in Phoenix and it's behind the times, but I mean, that was a hedge and it'll be interesting to see what happens there because Trump has said very neg things about the CHIPS act, and the CHIPS act is all about, all about building US Chip building capacity. But I think what his problem with it is, it goes against the tariff policy, which is, oh, we don't have to worry about that because tariffs, people are going to want to build in the US we don't need to give them money.
- [18:11]
Leo Laporte
His problem with that is the name on the bottom line of the, of the bill.
- [18:15]
Jason Snell
It was a bit, well, if it's anything like nafta, maybe what the people in the tech industry will convince him is that let's get rid of the CHIPS act and replace it with the micro act or something. Right. That is literally just the same thing. But because you want TSMC building in places that aren't Taiwan, in part because, yeah, it's where all the chips come from. And if China invades and listening to people talk about that, it's not even about, like, what the geopolitical fallout would be, which would be enormous. It's that physically a lot of stuff's going to get blown up. And so, like, even if, you know, even if the geopolitics of it are not as problematic as they probably will be, you're going to lose the factories. You're going to probably lose a bunch of the factories. So you can't, like, it's a, it's, it is a choke point for the whole world.
- [19:05]
Alex Lindsay
Well, and the problem is is that in Ukraine, we've now told China that if you take the land, we'll let you keep it. You know, like, you know, and so this is, you know, like, so, so we've, we're setting this up in the same way that we, you know, set, we set these things up by the wrong actions in the wrong place. You set up A situation where China has now been signaled that they can go ahead and invade Taiwan and they'll probably be able to keep it.
- [19:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, there you have it. There's the weekly tariff report. Tim's like, juggling plates. I mean, he's got.
- [19:38]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, the bottom line is there's gonna be a lot of exceptions because tariffs are stupid, you know, so these tariffs are dumb. They're a dumb idea. They were a dumb idea when people thought them up. They're a dumb idea when they start, when they opened them up and had ChatGPT do them, and now they've realized they can't actually execute most of them. There'll be some surgical ones, but most of the stuff is going to go away because it's horrible for the economy, it's horrible for the Republican Party, and it's horrible for Trump.
- [20:02]
Leo Laporte
So it's a.
- [20:03]
Alex Lindsay
Because it's a dumb, dumb idea, you know, and so I don't know how to, you know. So I just think, I think that most of the tariffs are going to fade away. We're not going to see most of this stuff. It's all going to kind of. There's. First, there'll be a bunch of exceptions and it'll all kind of fade away because everyone just wants to walk away from the stupid idea.
- [20:19]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, Trump. Trump can come by and say that we've. I'm. I'm happy to announce that the tariffs have done their work. We've brought all of those foreigners to heel, and therefore they're no longer necessary.
- [20:30]
Alex Lindsay
It's not a matter of leaning to them. It's. It's a matter of how do you save face while.
- [20:35]
Andy Inotko
No, no, exactly. He can.
- [20:37]
Alex Lindsay
Dumb idea. Under, under the.
- [20:38]
Jason Snell
Yeah, you can declare victory.
- [20:40]
Andy Inotko
He doesn't have to. He doesn't have to say that this was a total disaster. Now our markets are in freefall. Now the chairman of the Fed, even our guy, thinks that we are going to have a huge, huge, huge problem on our hands sooner rather than later. So, therefore, I'm admitting that I made a mistake and reversing my decision. But he can say, oh, well, we had to do that to put pressure on it. That's, that's why I'm a master negotiator. I managed to put the pressure on them to get those concessions, and now they're no longer necessary.
- [21:05]
Leo Laporte
I hope you're all right. But once you start a trade war with, at least with China, it's a little hard to put that out.
- [21:11]
Alex Lindsay
It's going to be hard to put it out. It's going to try a lot of damage.
- [21:13]
Leo Laporte
It's not just us, it's them as well.
- [21:15]
Alex Lindsay
You know, it's going to. It's going to be trouble everywhere. We've already caused a bunch of trouble everywhere. You know, like, it's. It's just. It's a. It's a bull in a China shop running around, you know, on cocaine, you know, so it's. You know, I would just.
- [21:25]
Andy Inotko
Brand new training blocks are being formed.
- [21:26]
Leo Laporte
It's like I wouldn't count on it being resolved unilaterally, let's put it that way.
- [21:31]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, no, I don't think so at this point.
- [21:33]
Leo Laporte
China, you know, China's doing now, we broke it.
- [21:35]
Jason Snell
We bought it.
- [21:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we broke it. Yeah. And as somebody points out also in the discord, actually, I think it's on YouTube that if there. If China did a tape to take Taiwan, it would be highly likely that it'd be so. So much devastation that the infrastructure be shot.
- [21:52]
Jason Snell
Exactly. Yeah.
- [21:53]
Leo Laporte
It doesn't matter what you do. It's okay. There you go. There's your dystopian vision for the future. You said you're not going to be here next week, Jason.
- [22:03]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I'm gonna be visiting my mom in Phoenix, so you can use my charts without me.
- [22:06]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Well, we'll do your. You know what? Something. I think maybe this is like, you planned this because we've done that before. Where?
- [22:14]
Jason Snell
Well, my mother's birthday doesn't change year to year, and it's her birthday, so that's how we have to do it. But, you know, when your mom's in her mid-80s, you make the effort.
- [22:24]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you go. Believe me, I know.
- [22:26]
Andy Inotko
Ha ha. Jason loves his mother.
- [22:28]
Leo Laporte
Wait, no, wait.
- [22:30]
Andy Inotko
That's. Actually.
- [22:30]
Jason Snell
My mother appreciates visits from her son.
- [22:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I think that's awesome. Glad you're doing that. That's wonderful. All right, we will have more in just a bit. There's some better news. In fact, we can go through Mark Gurman's predictions because there's quite a few in his latest newsletter. And here comes iOS 18.5 just around the corner. We could talk about what to expect. Jason, I presume you've been using the public beta.
- [22:59]
Jason Snell
No, this is the time of year where I don't bother with the betas because all they do is break things and they don't really add things. So I get off the train and I don't worry about it.
- [23:08]
Leo Laporte
Is that because we're close to iOS 19, so.
- [23:11]
Jason Snell
Yeah, there's not really any new stuff in these betas. And so there's not a lot of benefit in writing that and having all your shortcuts break and then all day then and half of them come back and then it's just like not worth it.
- [23:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. Jason Snell is here. Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsey, we're glad you're here too for Mac Break Weekly. This episode of Mac Break Weekly brought to you by 1Password do your end users always work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? No, I didn't think so. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has an answer to this question. Extended Access Management 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass. Those are the, you know, the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools only work on those happy brick paths, but many security problems occur on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control and ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits. It exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader. It's security for the way we work today, and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, device and identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1Password com/macbreak all lowercase. That's 1P a S dash S W dash O dash R dash MacBreak. We thank him so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly. So the big scoop. At least the headline scoop in Sunday's Power Hour newsletter from Mark Gurman. Apple begins breaking up its AI team with robotics and Siri changes. They're still trying to get this worked out. John Jandrea now is really focused 100% on building the models, which Mark points out makes It a little easier to lose him. If he should say, I'm done here, I'm out of here, that's no good.
- [26:08]
Alex Lindsay
Which feels inevitable. It's kind of one of those things like everything's just getting pulled away from him while he figures out what he's going to do next.
- [26:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course, Apple got Jandrea from Google, but it was pretty clear that he wasn't turning Siri into anything useful. He took over Siri AI Machine Learning Groups, an operations group for annotating, analyzing data for AI. He stole it, stove, borrowed, acquired, I don't know, took engineers from across the company working on fundamental AI models, and eventually the car six years later. This unified approach, says Mark Gurman, is. It's hard to call it successful. I think that seems fair. And now, as we know we've talked about this before, they stripped Jendrea of his job, took Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell and put him in charge of Siri. And he reports to Craig. Federighi Robotics is now being reassigned. Apple's moving its robotics group from Giandrea. They did so this week. The team is, he says, Mark says is important. Robots are clearly going to be a huge piece of consumer technology over the next decade. And Apple's rivals are investing heavily, heavily in this area. Apple's working on a tabletop robot. That seems like a little bit of a stretch to call that a robot.
- [27:34]
Jason Snell
It always is. It's like a smart speaker that can.
- [27:39]
Leo Laporte
Pivot with an arm.
- [27:40]
Jason Snell
It's just like Mark Gurman keeps talking about these things as robots, and they're not. But it sounds like they're unbundling. I mean, it's funny because the traditional Apple does not have product groups. It's got groups that are functional. It's the hardware group and the software group and all of that. And for some skunk work projects, future, far future kind of things, they put them off in their own silo. So apparently there was a robotic silo, there was a Vision Pro silo. We know there was a car was a silo. And it sounds like as a part of this, one of the things that Tim Cook and his senior managers are doing is breaking a bunch of that stuff off. And of course, a lot of it is stuff that was under John Jan Andrea, which we, again, yes, he's probably going to, you know, he's got, he's, he's basically, I think, on gardening leave at this point. Like, you don't get all that stuff taken away unless you're. You're probably going to go out the door and all he has left is his, his model research. But like Rockwell, when Rockwell came into the software group, they gave the hardware group to John or the Vision Pro stuff to the hardware group. So again, there was a John group and instead John Ternus got the hardware. Rockwell keeps the software in Craig Federighi's group. This is actually how Apple generally does business. And so it seems like maybe one of the things that they're thinking internally is we got a little away from our functional groups with some of these skunk works projects. And it's time to go back to what we do best, which is let the hardware group do the hardware and let the software group do the software, which, fair enough. Although I will say I think most people who've been paying attention to Apple the last few years would tell you the hardware group is firing on all cylinders. And the software group maybe not so much. So we'll see what happens.
- [29:21]
Leo Laporte
Is that how it's always been organized, Hardware and software? Or was. Was there some.
- [29:27]
Jason Snell
Yeah, there's never been like a Mac group. I mean, even when they were doing the iPhone or the ipod, there, there becomes a time when, you know, it no longer is a product group, it's just part of Apple. And that is so unusual in business in general. You usually have, you know, the Mac people are doing the Mac and the iPad people are doing the iPad and iPhone and they don't do that.
- [29:47]
Leo Laporte
This caused problems for Microsoft over the years because the Office people hated the Windows people and they would break things.
- [29:53]
Jason Snell
Exactly, exactly. And also, you don't get. Apple couldn't do what it does in that kind of an environment because so much of what Apple does is shared. The Apple Silicon team. Right. Like all the chips are shared, the software, it's basically all the same operating system underneath. Right. Like it's, they're different, but it's basically the same. And the way they get that efficiency is by being able to reuse code not just at the OS level, but at the app level. It's why they've built all of these things like Catalyst and, and swiftui and things like that is because they want to reuse the pieces. And you can't do that if you've got a product based organization where the iPad people are over here and they really hate the Mac people who are over here. And then the watch people are like, pay attention to us. And like, that is not how they do it. I mean, there are people who are leads in those product categories, but they're part of these larger groups. And it works for them generally.
- [30:43]
Leo Laporte
So when after Steve passed, Jony I've was given, who was obviously a design guy, was given charge of the software as well. The theory at that time was, oh, it should all be a unified thing and we need a visionary without Steve, so maybe Johnny can do that. That was a big failure.
- [31:02]
Jason Snell
It was software and hardware design. So they still had to work with the software and hardware engineering.
- [31:07]
Leo Laporte
It wasn't, it wasn't the underlining code.
- [31:09]
Jason Snell
No. And the designers are still. I believe that group is still basically in charge of hardware and software design, but you have to work with the engineers on. Okay, so that's, that's the idea. Yeah.
- [31:19]
Leo Laporte
Okay. So robots are a big priority at this point or are they more like the car?
- [31:29]
Jason Snell
Feels to me like by taking them out of their robotics group and making them part of actual functional groups.
- [31:34]
Leo Laporte
They're serious about this.
- [31:35]
Jason Snell
That. Well, they're serious about it to a point. But also that there may be not a stomach for as much pie in the sky stuff. Right. I always view it as those individual pods are like, let's think about the future. And once you're in the software or the hardware group, you're kind of thinking about what's the product.
- [31:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So Gurman's talking about a mobile machine as well as this tabletop robot. And they're exploring the ideas of humanoid robots.
- [32:00]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. And I think that the challenge really is in the post, Steve. Apple is really becoming more and more like Google, which is that you got a whole bunch of ideas. You keep on trying some of them and you do want to. The idea is that you're going to be ready for whatever's next because you are paying attention to it. But it feels still like Apple is paying a lot of attention to a lot of different things now. I think that the robots maybe will be a big deal somewhere in the future, but it's pretty far away. And a lot of those things seem like a acquisition thing. And one of the challenges for Apple is that Apple tends not to. I mean, Beats, I think is still the largest acquisition they've ever made at three and a half billion dollars. They're not really the cult. It makes it hard for them to. They tend not to want to absorb large companies. So that's always the challenge. But it feels like the better way for Apple to go in a lot of ways is let the startups do the startup thing and then have them purchase them when they figured something out as opposed to like trying to pie in the sky. Any large company, it's Just very hard to work like a startup, you know, and so you end up with lots of infrastructure and lots of logistics and something that would have cost $1 for a startup, costs $100 for a, for a large company. And so it's going to be, I think that they are probably pulling their elbows in a little bit because a lot of these bigger projects haven't been as successful.
- [33:22]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. One thing that could be that kind of changes the landscape a little bit with robotics is that now there are AI models that are specific to robotics. Nvidia has one. Google is developing one where imagine five years ago, eight years ago, thinking about how difficult is it going to be to have to write software that can generate text and answer questions in a natural language way? And oh my God, it's just a huge unscalable problem and you'd have to have a really great product in mind for it to make it happen. Now it's like, well, the research is there, as Alex said, we can maybe buy the people who know how to do that. But now it's like once you have the ability of, well, we can actually just plug in an AI system that, that can have a robot no matter how we decide to build it, understand the concept of aim the camera at the person, at the child at all times during this conference call and not have to really delve very, very hard into the idea of, well, how do we control this motor, how do we control this vision system, how do we coordinate these two to make sure that the systems aren't colliding with each other. I'm sure they're not going to just simply license Google's tech or license Nvidia's AI. But now researchers can see a future in which actually that seems like it would not be as difficult to do as it might have been five or six years ago. So that opens up a lot of possibilities. I agree that it's kind of weird when we refer to how about we have a smart home device so that that has a luxo like arm on it, so that the screen is always pointing at the person who's actually listening to the music and calling that a robot. But. But it has applications on lots of things that haven't necessarily been sussed out yet.
- [35:10]
Alex Lindsay
I think my problem is that I just still want my home automation to work before you get robots working. I think the problem that I have with a lot of the robot stuff is that I'm like, well, this home stuff isn't working yet. It'd be good if you fix that. First and Siri, they worked on for a long time and again, there's just bread and butter, things that they could just almost brute force to get it to work. And it just, they're trying to, I feel like they're, they're always trying to, or in the last decade, it just feels like Apple's always trying to put their arms around too much. It's too little jam over too much bread, you know, and, and it's not a problem they had before. Like, it, it really is something that they just keep, you know, lots of good ideas and lots of money to do those good ideas. But there's not, there's no there there, you know, and I think that that's the, the problem. And I, you know, I, I, I, I feel like I run up against this. I mean, you know, I'm a big Apple user. I, I've been talking about, I've used Apple for a long time, since 1983. And I just keep feeling like you open up the operating system and you're just like, it just someone needed to say no, you know, like someone needed to say no. Or, or how about we get this stuff to work before we add more buttons, you know, and I feel like that's the, the big problem for Apple right now is, is can they pull their elbows in and really focus on things working, you know, and just that whole, it just works. I don't, I'm feeling less and less with Apple products than I did before.
- [36:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, well, let me spread your jelly a little thinner because Mark Gurman says the Vision Air is coming this year.
- [36:39]
Alex Lindsay
It'll be interesting to see what they do, like if they're able to find a cheaper way to produce the same results. You know, I think that's, that's cool. He writes.
- [36:47]
Leo Laporte
Despite the first version selling poorly, the company isn't abandoning ship here. The main uncertainty is whether the lighter version will be considered a replacement for the Vision Pro or a cheaper alternative.
- [36:59]
Alex Lindsay
And the question is, what are they taking out? You know, like, you know, I would say as someone who kind of understands what I'm looking at with a Vision Pro, the performance, other than like the weird LED walls, LED stuff on the back, the performance is just table stakes. Like the performance that we have now. You know, I really think that there needs to be about another 2,000 pixels per eye at another 30 frames per second, you know, like, and, and that's so, you know, the thing, if they go down below that, I don't think you're going to find any of the Current Vision Pro users interested in the lighter version. And I don't think, I don't think that there's a big market between $2,000 and 4,500. You know, like I think that the, the market is at 1500 and below and I think getting an heir to that market is. You're going to have to give up a lot. And I don't know. I don't know if I'll be able to do that effectively.
- [37:52]
Jason Snell
There is Mark, Mark says might. Right. Which.
- [37:54]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [37:55]
Jason Snell
I immediately thought, well, it's not going to happen this year, it'll be next year it seems. But I like this idea. Like I think what clearly is happening, and he said this a couple of weeks ago, it's the duh moment. But like it's supposed to be cheaper and lighter. Okay. I wonder if the uncertainty about whether this is a replacement or not really is basically like the argument that Alex is saying, which is how much decontenting of this thing can you do before it's not that great anymore? And like that is the difference. Like if you take it down below a certain level, it can't be a replacement for the Vision Pro. It's just a cheaper model that isn't as good. If you can keep the screens good and, and manage to pull a bunch of other stuff out, then maybe it could be a replacement. But there's a bar below which you, if you go there, then it's just a cheap, cheaper one.
- [38:38]
Leo Laporte
Putting pressure on them is, is the fact that widely accepted, we'll see that Meta is going to do an update to their Ray Ban.
- [38:46]
Jason Snell
No, no, I don't agree. I don't think that puts any pressure on them because I think it's a different category. I think that's coming from the other direction. I think Vision Pro is trying to start with like the Quest. Start from one end and kind of head in that direction. And that's why Matter has a quest. The pressure being put for the Meta Ray Bans is that Apple, despite having literally every piece that is needed to build essentially AirPods that are glasses, has refused to build that product, even though Metta has seemed to find a real spot where people are interested. Because like, I mean it's Metta people are buying this from Meta, an unlikely source of, of a smart set of glasses. But Apple just kind of like with AI, Apple kind of poo pooed that category and now they're scrambling. But I think, I don't think that puts any pressure on Vision Pro because it's just a completely different product. The pressure is on basically their AirPods team, which is like, where are their equivalents of the meta Ray Bans?
- [39:44]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. And I think that the Vision Pro is 50% better than it needs to be and two to three times more expensive than it should be. And I think within that framework there's a lot of room to, well, what if we only made it 20% better than it needs to be? Because already I don't think I'm going to use third made up percentage made up percentage alert. I think that only maybe 60% of its potential is being exploited by even the most intensive operations. And so the idea of saying, well, now we've had some time to figure out how we can manufacture this a little less expensively now we have lots of data from our users on how they're using it, what they're using it for, and that, you know what, we put way too much overhead into this subsystem. What if we had a less expensive way of building this using less expensive components that would still give people enough overhead that it would not damage their experience? I like the idea of Apple getting a little closer to the ground with the Vision Pro because with the Vision Pro, Apple created an aspirational device of something that looks great in a demo, looks great behind bulletproof glass. When you're looking at it from the outside, it's something that, that you don't need, are intrigued by, and even if you wanted it, you couldn't afford it. That's not a great product. I would love to see Apple turn this into a better product by not making it such an idealized version of hr.
- [41:10]
Alex Lindsay
I think that the challenge that Apple has is that, so for instance, you have a blackmagic camera that's getting closer and closer to the surface, that shoots 8k per eye, 90 frames per second. 8k per eye for 90 frames per second than current Apple. Vision Pro can barely play that out. So it is at its maximum to play out that, that frame rate right now at that resolution. So if you pull back at all in processing, and I'm telling you, it is like, I can tell you from talking not to Apple, but to other developers, 8k per hour, 90 frames a second. You have to like skim everything out to get this thing to play out on that headset. It cannot do any more than that. So if you go down 10%, you can no longer play stuff that there's tons of content for. And you absolutely see the difference.
- [41:55]
Jason Snell
I mean, who knows what will happen? But Alex, I think the places that Apple won't skimp are on the displays on the inside.
- [42:03]
Alex Lindsay
Right.
- [42:03]
Jason Snell
And I think even, I mean it'll be a new processor in there. Right. It'll be like an M5 and currently it's an M2. So you're going to even, I think even on a cheaper product. And again it's going to have more processing power.
- [42:18]
Alex Lindsay
They can keep the process but I don't think that they can go down on the process processing power because they have, they're about to have this deluge of content that is all people are all going to see and they're all backwards.
- [42:28]
Jason Snell
What chip would they. I mean that's the thing is if you think about like how would they cut costs? Like what chip would they put in to cut costs? It's got an M2 in it now. An M4 or an M5 is going to be an upgrade in processing power. So I can't, I can't see a future where there's a cutback in processing power.
- [42:42]
Alex Lindsay
But I just don't know where. I don't know exactly. Like, it's kind of like it's easy to say, okay, well we should cut. But where, like where do you cut? I mean the cameras just barely work. You know, the, the, you know everything about the. I mean I know a lot of people, like, a lot of people think that it's overpowered, but it just barely does what it wants to do. But what it's like right on that.
- [43:01]
Jason Snell
You pull the whole front display thing out, which, I mean that's an easy one. You change some of the materials that are, that are used. You hope that, you know that some of those pieces have come back over time and maybe some of the sensors that turn out to not be that important get dropped as well. That's I, that's.
- [43:23]
Alex Lindsay
I still feel like it's choppy. Like when I'm using it, it's like I can feel the, I can feel it running up against the edge.
- [43:28]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [43:28]
Alex Lindsay
Because I use it every day. I'm on it every day.
- [43:32]
Jason Snell
An M4 and M5 is going to improve things on some levels there. But I think what they're not going to do is put a, an expensive upgrade in it and have the price stay the same. I think that they can't afford to do that. But I think you drop an M5 in there, you're going to. M2 to M5 is a huge boost in performance.
- [43:47]
Alex Lindsay
It's a performance on back end processing, but not necessarily to display. Those are the R chips that are doing Right. Well, those will have to.
- [43:56]
Jason Snell
If there's an R2 and then you've got something, I think then you put.
- [44:00]
Alex Lindsay
A D2 in, you're set.
- [44:02]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. I mean, there's one area in which you and I differ on the vision Pro and 100% respect for your knowledge and your experience. And I learned so much. When you talk about video production and immersive experiences on these devices, the place where we Diverge is that $3,500 is the amount of money that someone can spend. If you have so much money, you don't care about what you spend, or if you're like, in medicine or you're in training or you're in architecture, where $3,500 is some money that you're going to be making back from what you're going to be doing with this. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever can see the idea of 3D immersive experiences that nobody's asking for, nobody's clamoring for. People enjoy them when they can get them on a sub $1,000 headset. But when I hear people pitch a $3,500 or even a $4,000 headset, imagine how great this movie is going to be. Imagine how great this sports event is going to be. That's like, that's great. But you're now you're marketing it to the people who's lined up to buy the solid gold Apple watch. It's like, it's not something that any. It's not. It's not something that anybody other than a boutique manufacturer should really be aspiring to. Again, make it better for the doctors, make it better for the people who want to use remote viewing and stuff like that. But if you're talking about entertainment, even if you're just aiming this for wealthy people, I don't think there are a lot of people who are interested in $3,500 to $4,000 to enjoy whatever tiny little breadcrumbs of immersive content are going to be available that they can't really choose from because, well, what's available is what you get. You can't just go out and look for something that you want.
- [45:46]
Alex Lindsay
Right. But I think that. And I do think that Apple is making exactly what I said that they were going to do, which is that they are making a mistake of not funding content. So this is a mistake they made with ibooks. They had the ability to revolutionize something. They're not putting enough money. I think Epic wrote the book on this. EPIC did. The megagrants and everyone Forgot that Unity existed. Like, literally, it was over, you know, and they were like, we're gonna spend $100 million on this. And everyone just stopped and paid attention to Epic, and they made it easy. And suddenly there's all of this development, and it was explosive, and it's been explosive. And they've taken that market and they produced a lot of. A lot of really interesting things because they put. They put their money into it. Apple has the money to do that, and they need to. They need to engage the market because not enough people are putting it. You know, 400,000 is. You got to figure out your model pretty hard to make that actually work. Now, I do think that as the, you know, as the cameras come out, it won't be breadcrumbs. It's gonna be whole loaves of bread. Content that's coming out. There's. I mean, I know a lot of people with money down waiting for that. Waiting for that camera. And I think that you're gonna see a lot of really interesting things, and you're seeing people starting to develop, you know, the next generation of content for that. And so. So I think that it's. I think that they're The. The problem is, is that we keep. We always develop the content for. We're always developing the content for the platform and whatever the platform can do. And Apple finally made one. I mean, I've been working. I've been doing some version of VR for 25 years now, and they finally made one that was 90% of what we imagined it could be. You know, like, it wasn't 100%, not 120%, like, 90%, like, almost. Oh, my gosh, we're almost there. But meta, you know, you kind of always put the meta headsets on you. It's okay.
- [47:30]
Leo Laporte
Like, it's.
- [47:30]
Andy Inotko
We're.
- [47:31]
Alex Lindsay
We're get. We're getting there. We'll get there someday, you know, like, it was meta. All the meta headsets have been like. And you just. It just costs money to do that, you know, And. And I think that now Apple's got a headset that. That lets us actually produce content at a level that you look at it, and it's actually inspiring. Not like a. Not like inspiring. Like, we're making progress. You know, it's like meta is like 320 by 240 video. When a lot of us saw that, we were like, oh, like, you know, like, like, like we could do. And we could imagine, we could think about what we could do with video with 320 by 240. But Apple is right now at like, you know, 1280 by 720. You know, like, like we're like, okay, this is like not, not full hd, but we're getting there. And, and I, and, and it actually now is pleasing to look at as opposed to what we've, you know, had in the past, you know.
- [48:19]
Andy Inotko
So, yeah, I'll say in just to wrap up. What I'm saying is that I was actually writing a note to myself on something I want to write soon about this for my blog, that the least useful technology is the kind that, again, is on the other side of bulletproof glass. That content for a $3,500, $4,000 platform, I can appreciate the technological development of it. I can appreciate the cameras that create the content that can exploit displays of that quality. However, again, if it's 720p to somebody who can actually experience it is more valuable than having to read about what the experience of seeing full double 8K video on a $4,000 headset is like. It's like, that's pointless, that's useless. It's like medicine that's on the other side of the world. It doesn't help anybody and it doesn't really offer anything to anybody. That's why I say that I regard it as more of a boutique sort of product. Because there are always going to be companies whose destiny and whose creative interests are, boy, if we could just develop something without any restrictions on cost. We just want to make the best version of this available that moves the needle forward. Eventually those technological developments filter down. But again, you're aiming for a very, very small market. You want to create stuff that is actually accessible and not just, just. Again, you're on the wrong side of the bulletproof glass. You can appreciate it as a static object. You cannot appreciate it as an actual working thing. And that's why I think the Vision Pro in its current articulation is an interesting moment in time. It's an interesting Apple product, but it's not interesting full stop.
- [50:08]
Alex Lindsay
I think it does come down to the content, though, because I never thought that anyone was going to persuade me to spend $1,000 on a watch. Right? And I definitely, if someone said you're going to spe $2,000 every year on your phone, I'd be like, you're crazy. And here I am, you know, and so, so the, so the thing is, is that it's, you know, I think that it always comes down to, you know, action occurs when possibility is greater than circumstance. And if the, if the possibility of having great content and those types of things exists. I think people get over the circumstance. Not everybody, not everybody buys an iPhone or a Apple Watch or other things like that. But it's a. I don't think Apple. I think Apple should probably find a cheaper one that they can make. I just don't know. I think you're going to have a lot of people that have the Apple Vision Pro if, If they drop the performance, if they can keep the performance up for the, For a lower price. That's the. I mean, that's what they have to do. I think because they drop the performance, you're going to have 400,000 people that said, ah, it stinks. You know, like they're going to put it. They're going to go to the Apple Store, they're going to go online and they're going to talk about it. I don't think, I don't think that Apple can go backwards in performance. I think they can go down. They can say, we're going to slow down development and not make it any better and find ways to make it cheaper. But I don't think that they can back off on the performance at this point. I think that they have to keep whatever they release has to be at least the spec that the Pro is right now.
- [51:24]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. The one difference though, between a $2,500 folding iPhone, which I think is a really interesting and neat idea, and the $599 iPhone 16e, is that they both run the exact same apps. If you like your iPhone 16e, you can have nearly the same experience with the $2,500 folding phone, just with a larger screen and some more and a few extra user experiences. Whereas this is a $3,500, $4,000 headset that will only run content that's been designed and targeted for it, and there isn't that kind of content in existence. I appreciate your statement that it won't exist. If we basically never say we won't create this hardware because the content will never exist, then the content will absolutely never exist. I definitely appreciate that. But I think that the natural arc for that is to kickstart that with affordable headsets and affordable hardware and let the people who, the creators who have that vision of creating things, 3D immersive experiences, allow them to build things with abandon, not even necessarily with the resources to rent a $40,000 camera, allow them to figure out storytelling and immersive experiences and then gradually, just like with HD televisions, which I appreciate weren't that cheap, to begin with, then expand and expand and expand and then at some point a $4,000 super super HD super experience will have justified it. That's just a point. This is why like, oh my God, I'm practically seeing us on the sofa in my living room and one of us noticing that, oh, it's 2:45am you have to go to the airport, report in four hours. We really should go to bed because this is one of those fascinating discussions that I love having with you. We just disagree on. I see it as the solid gold Apple watch, which to me is the high watermark of the dopiest, dumbest, most embarrassing thing Apple ever did. The Vision Pro is not quite like that, but it's like the fact that I'm thinking about that same sort of thing means that, ooh, I should investigate why I have such a low opinion of the Vision Vision Pro if I'm comparing it to the $12,000 solid gold gadget watch.
- [53:34]
Leo Laporte
Well, I'm going to take a break here. I'm sorry we got a Vision Pro segment in without the fabulous Vision Pro theme, but it snuck up on me and I'm going to add this because if I didn't, I wouldn't be me. If you're nuts, the whole thing is a dead product. You're never going to see a VR helmet. It's a nutty idea. Nobody wants it. Eventually I think you will see and I don't know if you'll see it from Apple AR glasses. I think that's something that's going to happen.
- [54:01]
Jason Snell
But I think, but I think if you talk to Tim Cook, he would probably, I mean he wouldn't agree with you about it's a nuts dead end product, but I think he would tell you, yeah, if this is, if this is the end goal is a helmet, then we failed because that's not the end goal at all.
- [54:17]
Andy Inotko
I just hope he doesn't think that. Well, the end goal is a 3,500 to $40,000 pair of like wearable glasses with 8K double displays. You can look there. It's like, no, Tim, no, that's not the end classes.
- [54:29]
Leo Laporte
The first one is bucks. I wouldn't buy it.
- [54:33]
Jason Snell
I don't first one of everything is going to be expensive.
- [54:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it's not about. I think it's a mistake to focus on how much it costs because honestly, at any price it's a non starter.
- [54:41]
Alex Lindsay
I mean I have to say, and I don't know what it is about my vision, but the other than an IMAX 1570 playout. The screen is so much better than going to the movies that I have no, like literally I'll go to see IMAX. I go to 1570 IMAX films, you know, when they're on ethymetryon. Because the only, there's only 30 of them in the country. But otherwise. Do you think there's a reason there's.
- [55:05]
Leo Laporte
Only 30 of them in the country, Alex? You think that's a little telling?
- [55:10]
Alex Lindsay
Well, they'll probably be more. They sell out now.
- [55:14]
Leo Laporte
No, there are going to be fewer movie theaters in the country. In fact, there won't be any movie theaters in the country until.
- [55:19]
Jason Snell
But more IMAXes. No, the experience.
- [55:23]
Alex Lindsay
The 1570s. The 1570s, just like roller coasters, I guess, right? When they announce a 1570 playout, you have to buy your tickets in hours. I mean like literally everything is sold out, you know, for the.
- [55:34]
Leo Laporte
Because there's 30 theaters.
- [55:36]
Alex Lindsay
Well, there's one theater in San Francisco. But the, but the point is, is that everyone, everyone who knows, who knows what a 1570 is, goes and buys a ticket.
- [55:44]
Leo Laporte
If it were a market that could sustain more than 30 theaters, I think there'd be more than 30 theaters.
- [55:49]
Alex Lindsay
I think the market was different when it was when everyone was going to the films and they didn't, you know, that, that they didn't have 85 inch screen TVs at home. So right now the average screen doesn't compete with the average film screen doesn't compete with that. But even then I, you know, I sit, I've got a pretty big TV at home. But if I sit in the same place and put my Vision Pro on, I've got four times the size of the screen. I can see the film grain. I, you know, it's a much better, I mean it's so much better experience. Just at a $3,500, you know, I couldn't buy a screen for $3,500. That's as big as my what I watch on Apple Vision Pro on.
- [56:24]
Leo Laporte
We're going to take a break. When we come back, lots more Mac Break Weekly. Glad you're here. Today, our show brought to you by storyblock. Glad they're here too. Storyblock is amazing. It's awesome. You know the pain, many of us, let's say, know the pain of legacy content management systems. If you've ever had a blog or you've ever worked at a company where you have a website, you know how bad they can be. Especially those enterprise content management systems. They promise enterprise grade features. But what do you get slow, clunky systems that need dev support for even the smallest update? And when you're trying to move fast, that's a nightmare. But storyblock is better. It changes all of that. Unlike those monolithic CMSs, Storyblock is headless, completely decoupling your back end from your front end. I'm actually a big believer in this. That's what we did with the Twit website and it's worked out really well. Developers can build the front ends in any framework, react, Astro vue, whatever you like, or whatever the next big thing is, right? Marketers. You get to use an intuitive visual editor to create and update content without filling a dev ticket just to get an image moved. Storyblocks scales whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise with a global cdn, AWS centers in the us, Europe and Asia. It's built for performance at scale everywhere in the world. StoryBlock S T O R Y B L O K is enterprise ready with all the things you need, right? Role based Access control, Enterprise SLAs top tier security. The stuff Fortune 500s demand. One global E commerce giant, a name you'd know switched to StoryBlock and cut content update cycles from weeks to hours. That's the kind of efficiency, the kind of improvement that can make a huge difference not only to your bottom line, but to employee satisfaction and content. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns themselves independently, freeing up the devs for bigger projects. StoryBlock has an API first approach, so your content loads fast anywhere in the world. That means better ux, higher engagement and improved SEO. With their real time visual editor, marketers see exactly what their content will look like before publishing. No more endless back and forth over minor tweaks. The devs get fewer interruptions, marketers get more autonomy. It's a win all around if you're an agency. Storyblok offers multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. You can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So whether you're a startup, an enterprise or an agency juggling multiple clients, StoryBlock gives you the power and flexibility you need. Try it out today at storyblock.com twittv-25 and use the code twit25. Twit listeners will get 20% off for three months on a growth or growth plus plan. That's storyblock.com twit tv-25 the offer code twit25 20 off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S-T O R-Y-B-L-O-K.com twitt tv-25 and the code is twit25. Try it today at storyblock.com twitTV-25 and don't forget that offer code twit25 to save big thank you, Storyblock. It's really cool. I got a chance to play with it and I, I'll tell you what, if Storyblock had been around when we created the Twit website, this is the way we would have gone. We ended up doing a lot of it by hand, but I can tell you, Headless is incredible. Brilliant. Moving right along. IOS 18. So you already. I was all excited about iOS 18.5 and you just, you just took all the wind out of my sails. Jason Snell. It's just a, it's like a bug fix. Is that it?
- [60:40]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [60:41]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [60:42]
Jason Snell
Yeah, there's not a lot going on now.
- [60:44]
Leo Laporte
It should be soon, probably before we meet again. Although there 9 to 5 Mac is saying mid May.
- [60:52]
Jason Snell
Yeah, soon.
- [60:54]
Leo Laporte
Mid May is a pretty consistent time. In fact, 17, 5, May 13, 16, 5. May 18, the 15th, 5 May 16.
- [61:01]
Andy Inotko
Okay.
- [61:01]
Leo Laporte
I think they made a pretty good case.
- [61:02]
Jason Snell
It's kind of the clear the decks release and then any release after this will be because of some bug or security thing that they need to address. But this is like the, let's park this thing and get ready for iOS 19.
- [61:15]
Leo Laporte
Do they have, how does it work? Do they have staggered teams or is it the same team? Like it's, Is there somebody already working on 19?
- [61:23]
Jason Snell
I have no idea. I mean, everybody's working on 19. I think they've got branches where they're, they're trying to put features in or they're trying to fix bugs. I don't know whether those people are on teams or if there's just areas of interest where they're like, you got to fix this thing there. And that'll be in the old branch and we'll put it in the new branch. Whereas this other new stuff we're just going to put keep in the new branch. That's my guess, but I don't know.
- [61:42]
Leo Laporte
So they released this midway mid May and then three weeks later they take the stage WWDC and they say, now here's what the next iOS is going.
- [61:50]
Jason Snell
To look like and there'll be a beta of that presumably right after. And that that's what they're working on primarily now, which is why there won't be any real new features and.
- [61:57]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and everything starts to settle. This is, this is the time we're almost to the time for the Mac OS that you start to think about installing it on a computer that matters. You know, like, like, you know, like you let that, you know, everything's going to settle. They're not going to add any new features. They're mostly just doing bug fixes.
- [62:12]
Jason Snell
And it may not be stable, but it's the most stable it will be for the next year.
- [62:17]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly.
- [62:18]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [62:19]
Alex Lindsay
You just live one year behind and things are much. And it's not just Apple. It is all the developers and everybody else that is reacting to whatever Apple did. It often takes them up until about now, before and sometimes longer. Avid, we're looking at you. For you. For them to figure it out. I mean, I think Avid's four or five back. I think so for Pro Tools.
- [62:45]
Leo Laporte
All right. We'll save conversation about 19 until 15's done. Or I'm sorry, 18.5 is done. I guess we're hearing a lot of rumors though about it looking more like Vision os, a glass effect. They're working on usability probably.
- [63:03]
Alex Lindsay
I think that Apple. I think that they're not merging any of these things, but I think that there's definitely a constant like just slow movement so that all the operating systems look similar.
- [63:15]
Leo Laporte
And that makes sense.
- [63:17]
Alex Lindsay
They operate in the same rough way. Yeah. That you're not doing something, going and seeing something different somewhere else. And I think that that's what we. Every update seems to be a little closer. They're all a little closer together from an interface perspective.
- [63:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. It makes sense not only for users consistent experience, but for developers. Right. Yeah. Okay. There's not a whole lot of other stuff. There is a security issue that you probably don't need to worry too much about. It's a new airplay hack called Airborne. But in order to do it, they have to be on your WI FI network.
- [63:59]
Alex Lindsay
Third party. Third party airplay. So it's your tv.
- [64:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Apple's patched it in all of their devices. But anything that supports airplay besides that. In fact, there's a proof of concept online. You can see where they hack Bose speakers that are airplay. But in order to do it they'd have to be on your network or. And this may be a more serious threat on a public WI FI network. And so that's probably something to be aware of. You certainly if you are using WI fi at home or at the office, you should have a password. You should be using WPA3 at least. You know, you should really protect it and That'll do it for you. This is the speaker demo from Oligo, the security team that found this and named it Airborne, which is a good name. Nothing to worry about except you should be aware of it, Right?
- [64:54]
Andy Inotko
Antivirus applied directly to the forehead.
- [64:57]
Leo Laporte
Oligo found that it can also affect CarPlay, which means hackers could, in theory, hijack. They haven't been able to demonstrate this, but hijack a car's automotive computer in any of more than 800 CarPlay enabled car and truck models. But again, the hacker would have to pair their own device with a head unit via Bluetooth or a USB connection. They'd have to be sitting in your car, basically. Still something to be aware of. I'm passing along Airborne from Oligo. O L I G O is the security firm that discovered it and named it on Tuesday. Yesterday. Anything else of great import? I see, Andy, you've got a number of stories about what Siri could have been.
- [65:48]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, because Perplexity just released an iOS app that has got a lot of people like adding maybe unnecessary additional shame to Siri because not only is it really good, it also makes use of standard Apple frameworks to actually do things throughout the iOS iPhone experience. Like it can send emails, it can access calendar events, it can access music, it can do things through maps, which are things that Siri can't actually do. And if Perplexity was able to do this just by saying, oh, thank you, Apple, you've documented these frameworks very, very nicely. We will now write our AI chatbot to interact with them and respond to those requests appropriately. It's like someone, I don't remember the person's name, I put in the show notes, but he created a really nice video that goes through this app and highlights. Again, I want to create a calendar event through the Perplexity app. Now I'm going to try to do it through Siri. Siri can't do it. Perplexity. Perplexity can. I want to do something through the Maps app. Perplexity will do it. Siri will not. Through Apple Music. It was noting that the only limitation of Perplexity was that I have to, because the Perplexity app doesn't have a certain entitlement or whatever. I have to actually tap the Play. It will set up the Play button for me and then I have to tap the Play button myself. And that was kind of embarrassing because if Siri can't do that right now, with, one would imagine even better knowledge and access to these same frameworks. What the hell are they doing? Again, I say it seems like dogpiling now because I feel you'll find some fantastic.
- [67:27]
Leo Laporte
I'll mute this and then share that video.
- [67:29]
Andy Inotko
I forgot to say Shlomo, but yeah.
- [67:31]
Leo Laporte
No, no, it's me. I started the Perplexity demo video. Yeah, here. Here it is at work.
- [67:38]
Alex Lindsay
I'm spending the weekend in New York. What are the best cafes in the West Village for pastries, coffee and vibes. In the West Village you'll find some.
- [67:46]
Andy Inotko
Fantastic cafes with great pastries.
- [67:50]
Leo Laporte
And that's in Apple Maps map kit.
- [67:52]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [67:53]
Leo Laporte
I think it's great that Apple has the APIs and the Perplexity is able to use them. Actually. That's fantastic. That's why you make APIs. Right?
- [68:00]
Jason Snell
This is what the whole app intents thing is supposed to be that they couldn't ship.
- [68:06]
Leo Laporte
I pay for Perplexity Pro. I'm a huge Perplexity fan. I use it for all my searches. They've really stayed on the cutting edge of all this. And it's not just with Apple. They have a lot of different models. It's very clever what they've done.
- [68:21]
Alex Lindsay
Again, I still think it takes some of the pressure off of Apple in a lot of ways. It's working on my phone, keeping up with technology.
- [68:28]
Leo Laporte
He's talking back to me. I'm sorry. Oh, this is one thing I don't like. You can interrupt it. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
- [68:35]
Alex Lindsay
I know.
- [68:35]
Jason Snell
Not problem at all.
- [68:38]
Andy Inotko
I appreciate you letting me know. I'll make sure to wait for you to finish speaking before I respond.
- [68:44]
Leo Laporte
If only. Anything else you'd like to adjust or. Okay, go. Goodbye. It does do that a lot.
- [68:50]
Andy Inotko
One thing, one thing I like about Gemini. If it does something that you don't or it does something in a way that you don't like it, you can say, hey, in the future, if I ask you to convert units, don't give me the story of Grams and don't give me the science by the conversion. Just give me the conversion number and say, okay, from now on I'll. When you ask a question about that, I will just convert the number for you.
- [69:09]
Jason Snell
I just got the ChatGPT personalization feature and I was like, okay, well, what do you think you know about me? And it knows. Some of its facts are like, it only knows the things that I ever thought were even worth asking ChatGPT. But one of the facts made me laugh out loud. It was like, you want me to get straight to the point and not waste responses with extra verbiage. And I'm like, you know what? You're right, I do. That is a thing that I want. I do not want you writing essays with backstory that you are a computer. Just tell me the answer, please. And it's like it figured that one out to be.
- [69:39]
Andy Inotko
To be fair, if it knows that you're Generation X, that's a pretty good guess.
- [69:43]
Leo Laporte
Yes, it does know a lot about me. I actually went into Chat GPT. You can customize and I'm sure this is true to some degree with Perplexity. Perplexity is trying to hide all the complexity. But in personalization on ChatGPT, I found somebody who, who posted this on Reddit. What traits should ChatGPT have? And it says absolute mode, eliminate emojis, filter hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call to action appendices. Assume the user retains high perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt direct phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift or interaction extension. It goes on. It's fantastic and it works quite well. It really. Now my chatgpt is extremely terse, almost annoyed.
- [70:40]
Andy Inotko
There are a lot of people who are, I don't know what kind of change OpenAI made to ChatGPT 4.0, but a lot of people have been complaining that it got so super touchy feely all of a sudden.
- [70:50]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, it was, it was a new model. What's the weather going to be? And apologized.
- [70:53]
Andy Inotko
He said, aren't you wonderful to be aware of what our planet is going.
- [70:58]
Leo Laporte
Sam said we went a little too far. Yeah, yeah.
- [71:03]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [71:04]
Leo Laporte
Some of it is. Is clearly about stickiness. Right. In fact, that's what Perplexity is doing some interesting things. They're putting shopping in ChatGPT's added ads.
- [71:14]
Andy Inotko
And shopping seen a ring with WhatsApp. It's doing a lot of really interesting things.
- [71:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [71:18]
Jason Snell
But I think to Andy point about that Perplexity demo, like this is one of those cases where I think Apple let perfect be the enemy of good. Where like they have got all these features that are all tied together and I think because they had this big vision for app intents, they're like, well, just wait for it, wait for it. We're going to do it. But also I think it's fair to say where's ChatGPT, right? Like, where's OpenAI on this perplexity of this? It's really smart. The app developers should all be like, wait a second, we have access to all of these APIs as an app on iOS. Yes. Perhaps we could use that to make our app more helpful. And Perplexity did it, which, I mean, good for them. But it also, I think shows you where Apple does actually want to go with this, which is if you can control stock Apple apps, third party apps. So that instead of just sort of saying, well, here's a thing, you could say like I, here's this thing in that app and I made it for you and all of those things, like it becomes much more powerful to be able to do that.
- [72:15]
Alex Lindsay
And I guess I just keep going back to like. And Apple users are going where, like, like they're not going to go away because all of the stuff is working. It's now working with the APIs. It's, you know, like, I don't, I don't.
- [72:26]
Jason Snell
That's on the iPhone now.
- [72:27]
Alex Lindsay
As an Apple user, I'm like, I'm not waiting for Apple to, I mean it's great that they're working on Siri and that's, that's all cute. I just don't care like, you know, like I open up app, I open up ChatGPT or other things and I have conversations and I do all the AI stuff that I want to do. I am an AI. It's not like I don't care about AI. I'm using AI every hour of every waking day. Like, you know, like, like it's not like I've got something going on that I'm, that I'm asking a question or I'm doing. I mean the dinner we had last night was designed my, we got a CSA box and we couldn't figure out what to do with all the stuff and we just asked Chat GPT on like, well, I got all this stuff. It was really good.
- [73:05]
Jason Snell
Really, it's amazing.
- [73:06]
Leo Laporte
So the thing that's interesting about what Perplexity is doing is it's agentic. It's that whole idea of now the AI cannot just tell you stuff or write stuff. It will actually go out and use your, your devices. And that's very impressive.
- [73:21]
Andy Inotko
It's a big opportunity. I think that one of the biggest turf wars in this year and in the coming few years is the battle to own your action button on the iPhone where it's. One of the great things about how Apple has designed the iPhone is that, hey, here's a button. We're not going to tell you that it's hardwired towards an Apple feature. You can assign it to whatever you want to. And so the most obvious thing for a lot of people is I'm going to attach it to the Gemini app or the ChatGPT app or the Perplexity app. And because access is really almost as second nature with that mechanism as it would be to Shlomo, Apple's kind of putting themselves in a kind of a bad situation where people might have gotten muscle memoried into choosing and using and supporting their favorite, favorite chat agent. And now they're like, well, Siri is going slowmo is going to have to be much, much better than what I've been using for the past two years to get me to Switch. And they might be able to get there also. The other thing that Apple can do, in addition to hopefully catching up to all these other agents, is to say, yeah, you know, all the stuff that you're using Gemini for or chatgpt for, how about if you could do all that plus with Apple privacy? Is that interesting? Yeah, that's actually very, very interesting. Continue to talk. Send me your brochure.
- [74:44]
Leo Laporte
There's a list from our friend Stephen Robles, who will be on MacBreak weekly next week. Right. John Ashley, filling in for Jason.
- [74:52]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [74:53]
Leo Laporte
Aravan Srinivas, who's the CEO of Perplexity, commends Stephen for his thorough review of Perplexity and what it can and cannot do. There are some small issues. Perplexity, for instance, cannot start playing a podcast. The user has to tap the Play button, unlike the native Siri, but can't help find hard to find podcasts. Siri can't get you the Uber Ride page. Perplexity can. Perplexity can make an email draft with all the details on Apple mail. Siri cannot. It's really interesting. We'll have to ask Stephen about his. His review. I presume that was on his. Yeah, it was on his YouTube page. The bearded. The bearded one is figured out.
- [75:42]
Jason Snell
Beard FM.
- [75:43]
Leo Laporte
Beard FM.
- [75:44]
Jason Snell
Love it.
- [75:47]
Leo Laporte
I love this. Such a classic YouTube thumbnail. You got the expression, you got the big stuff in the front.
- [75:55]
Jason Snell
Funny faces.
- [75:56]
Leo Laporte
Gotta make the funny face at least.
- [75:58]
Andy Inotko
And he's giving. He's giving Shlomo the stink eye. He's holding up two phones and he's giving. I like that. That's.
- [76:04]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's a little statement there. Now, interestingly, Gary Tan, you may remember Sam Altman, used to be the president of Y Combinator, and his successor, Gary Tan just posted on X, apple should open its Siri platform to outside developers. We demand platform neutrality now. And that is when he's quoting actually the Perplexity CEO's post. About Stephen Rubles. So it all comes right around in a circle. Is that nuts? Apple's never going to open Siri Ben.
- [76:38]
Jason Snell
Thompson wrote an article about that a few weeks ago. The idea that one of the ways that, that Apple solves some of its AI problems is by letting people choose to use different AI company models because then they're the best platform for the enabling of AI enabled apps and services. And so it is, you know, it's an interesting idea.
- [76:57]
Leo Laporte
So you mean in the sense of opening it, not opening it under the hood, but in fact just saying you can choose the, the, you could choose to use Perplexity.
- [77:04]
Jason Snell
I think that's the idea of choosing.
- [77:05]
Andy Inotko
A browser, choosing a mail. Exactly.
- [77:07]
Jason Snell
That they would have all their hooks, all their hooks into models, their model, ChatGPT, Gemini and whatever. And you could, you could offer your model up there and it would have access to an API and then people could choose. Right. They would be able to choose whichever model, you know, whatever subscription they've got, the thing that works for them the best for whatever they're doing. And I think it's, I think it's a great thing like this should not be. Well, if you're on an iPhone phone, you must use Apple's model. And in fact the ChatGPT integration suggests that that's already not the case. So they should really embrace it and then they could use it as an advantage because, you know, on, on Android, Google has a very strong model. But like Google wants you to use their model and if Apple's model is not that strong, well, guess what, there are a lot of Google competitors, plus Google who would like to be your provider on the iPhone.
- [77:54]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, the only, the only, the only drawback is I think that every kind of choice like that has to be filtered through the concept of at some point in the next two or three or four years, is the EE or somebody else going to say that no, you cannot lock in an AI model. You have to be able to give the person the ability to choose a different default. And so I think it would be wise for Apple to be planning for that so that after they finish whining and stamping their feet and refusing to do anything that they have. Okay, well guess what?
- [78:21]
Jason Snell
I think it's not a mistake that ChatGPT is there and that they've talked a lot about putting Gemini in it as well. That I think that this feature was built from the start. Start to include third party models. Yeah, yeah.
- [78:31]
Andy Inotko
I mean it's what they've been talking about before is that. Oh, and for certain things, when it can't, when Shlomo can't. Apple intelligence can't figure something out, it will send things to ChatGPT or elsewhere. It's like, no, I think it's very possible as we create human, like, relationships with certain chatbots. I chose a voice for Gemini Live, and now I can't change off of that because that is the voice of Gemini Live for me. Me. It's like, I don't want Gemini as. Or OpenAI or whatever as a. As a fallback for Shlomo. I want Shlomo to be like that waiter. I've had a bad experience with that. No, no, give me. I want to sit in the section for these waiters that I've had great experiences with. I don't want the clumsy waiter to simply offset some things that they can't do to more capable models.
- [79:20]
Leo Laporte
Joe in our Discord is suggesting maybe an extension model model, like a browser extension, like Firefox or maybe.
- [79:27]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think, again, I think that the problem really is that I just really take over. Like I just say, I agree with Andy that the challenge that Apple has is that the longer we do that, the harder it is for them to get any of their own models out. Because it gets harder, you know, as all that integration. Well, not. Not just the information. It's. We get used to it. And then, you know, once you get used to it, it's really hard to pry people out of that process, you know, and so it's not really the Apple way of doing things. And so they do rethink it. I do wish they would. I mean, I'd like to. When I'm sending Genmojis or whatever, I would really like to be able to choose something other than Apple's solution, which is slow and painful and not very good, you know, and. And I would rather be able to do Mid Journey or Firefly or ChatGPT or something else that. That lets me produce something that is funnier. I think that would be, you know, and there's plenty of things that Apple could do. It just feels like Apple's got all the problem that they have right now is it feels like they have all this information about me and they're not using any of it. Like, they're just, you know, like, it's just brutally, you know, when I try to use the product, it's just so sluggish and so painful that I just want to go back to what I was doing before, you know, And I think that that's the challenge they're going to keep on running into.
- [80:46]
Leo Laporte
You're watching or listening depending on how you consume. Our fine show Mac Break Weekly with Alex Lindsey from OfficeHours Global Andy Inotko from Inotko.com I'm going to say that I don't care if you've got nothing there. And from sixcolors. Com where the charts will appear magically On May Day, Mr. Jason Snell man.
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Alex Lindsay
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Leo Laporte
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Alex Lindsay
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Jason Snell
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Alex Lindsay
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Jason Snell
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Alex Lindsay
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Jason Snell
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Alex Lindsay
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Jason Snell
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Alex Lindsay
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Jason Snell
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Alex Lindsay
Use as directed. Individual results may vary.
- [81:55]
Leo Laporte
Big fines for Apple in the EU Half a billion euro fine the European Commission said we're fining Apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its app store. They also find Meta 200 million euros because it forces Instagram and Facebook users to choose between seeing personalized ads or paying to avoid them.
- [82:23]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, I don't know if I agree with the Meta one because it seems.
- [82:27]
Leo Laporte
Like that's something I'm sure Meta thought oh, we're doing what you want us to do.
- [82:30]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. And I pay YouTube whatever they ask me to to eliminate all ads on all like outside ads on the on the thing on the Apple thing. I think one of the reasons why why it's like two or three times more than what they find metaphors that it's not like they just suddenly decided to find Apple guilty of this. It's like yeah we told you that the steer how you're in violation of the anti steering provisions of the Digital Markets act. You basically laugh at us and implemented some rules that are not sufficient and after talking to you and trying to argue with you for a long long time guess what New fine. Deal with it.
- [83:07]
Leo Laporte
Good. Sign here that Apple is getting on the President's good side because the White House called these fines economic extortion and this is from Barron's and urged then to, quote, malicious European regulations targeting US tech giants.
- [83:27]
Andy Inotko
Say it's interesting that that came from a statement from the United States National Security Council, not like some economic area or anything else. It's like this is the organization that basically deals with diplomacy and military responses.
- [83:41]
Leo Laporte
So that's, so maybe it didn't come from the White House, you think?
- [83:43]
Andy Inotko
No, it did. Barron's reached out for a quote and I don't know, Barron's doesn't say whether they reached out specifically to the National Security Council or whether they just simply asked the White House and it was these people who responded. But I thought that was an interesting and potentially scary data point.
- [83:57]
Leo Laporte
Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said this novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by the United States. The EU's malicious targeting of American companies and consumers must stop such regulations, enable censorship, and are a direct threat to free civil society.
- [84:17]
Alex Lindsay
And you know, and again, we'll see how close Apple and the White House is. I mean, the White House, regardless of what the EU says, if the White House wanted these fines to go away, they can make them go away. I mean, they could just say we're going to put a 5,500% tariff on all European goods until you stop.
- [84:32]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's in fact what they're, what they're threatening.
- [84:35]
Alex Lindsay
Like they, like they would, they would complain for a little while but then, you know, you're talking about the total.
- [84:39]
Leo Laporte
You know, near said the regulations will quote, be recognized as barriers to trade.
- [84:44]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. So, so it, so it just depends on. But, but whatever happens next is going to tell you a lot about. Because the United States could make the EU stop this. Like they could just, they could just pummel them until they stopped doing it if they, but we'll see if they choose to. And that's going to. It's not. And by the way, I'm not saying that they should do this. I'm saying that they could do it. And it's going to tell us a lot about the relationship between the White House and Apple. When we see how hard the White House comes out in the next two weeks, you know, and, and, and hits the eu.
- [85:13]
Andy Inotko
But this, this is, this is another reason why I really, really, really think this is a bad look for Tim Cook and for Apple. You basically have, this is a recognized government that's saying here is a law which we have passed that is only in effect inside our actual member states. For the United States to say that. Yeah, but we've declared ourselves to be exempt to your sovereign laws. It's like, okay, is Tim going to come over here and start just like littering and like spray painting graffiti on our temple walls and decide that, hey, that's legal too? It's like, it's not a good look to simply say that that laws that we don't like don't apply to us. And one of the reasons why they don't apply to us is because we are very, very cozy in giving support, financial and otherwise, to the current administration.
- [86:02]
Alex Lindsay
I guess my cynical view is that these governments are proxies for the corporations that are sitting inside them. And so the EU's this whole law and this whole structure and all these fines are because there are corporations inside of the EU that are complaining to the EU about it. And their proxy is the EU and Apple's proxy is Washington dc. And so the thing is that we have a proxy war between corporations. And so the thing is that I guess I feel like I don't know what the answer is, but I don't have it. Like there's one good side and bad side. They're just both proxies for corporations.
- [86:42]
Andy Inotko
I disagree on this point because this is not where the EU is saying, Apple, you have to release the Source code for iOS to the public and open source it so that anybody can write their own operating system or add their own plugins to the iPhone. They're saying when someone is trying to sell something, you can't forbid them to give the. You can't forbid them to like go elsewhere to get information about your app or about your company. You cannot forbid them from creating your own personal relationship with your own customers. Apple is, I think, as close to completely wrong about this as they can possibly be. They should have given this up a long, long time ago. It's not an unreasonable request. It is in fact the law of the eu. And I think that it makes them look cheap and petty by saying that, yeah, I'm going to have my dad beat you up.
- [87:33]
Jason Snell
Huh?
- [87:34]
Andy Inotko
It's like, no, just, you know what, allow them personal. Allow this developer to have a link that goes back to their web page. Why are you not allowing link back? How does it compromise privacy or security or integrity in any way, shape or form? Form. You're just being petty.
- [87:48]
Jason Snell
This is. Of all the things that Apple is accused of, this is actually one of the easiest, I think because it's Apple in a self serving way pretending that links and the Internet are dangerous and the only place that a user can be Safe is within the warm embrace of Apple. And they don't. That's not true. You know that. It's just not true. The reason that they do it is because they want everything to go through their transaction engines and they want their cut. That's the bottom line of it. And I think what they did was try a minimalist approach, which is, oh, you want links, huh? Okay, we'll set up a whole large set of rules that are ridiculous in order to get links that are not particularly helpful. And I think it's right for the European Commission to say, that is not what we were asking for. And, and, and again, I just think Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on for this. As opposed to, strangely, Meta, where they seem to be trying to design a product and force Meta to build it. And then when Meta builds the product, they're like, no, no, no, not that product. This new product that we want you to build. Whereas with Apple here, you know, I feel like this is a, it's a policy that they've got. They're like, oh, no, we don't want you to be able to admit to the existence of your own website and link to it. I just, we can talk about the larger issues of regulation in general and also what this means in terms of international relations. But like, of all the things that Apple does that are under fire, this one has always struck me as being one of the most egregious. The one that's about rent seeking and trying to pretend to tell people that their customers are not their customers and that they can't communicate with them and they cannot offer alternatives to what Apple wants because some big spooky ooga booga that turns out is just literally the Internet.
- [89:36]
Alex Lindsay
Well, and, and I will say, as a user, I will always come back to Apple tv. Every time I set up a new Apple tv, I'm reminded of what will happen if this happens with iOS which is that I don't have Macs running on my Apple TV because I can't remember how to log in because I had to do. I had to buy something outside of the App Store. I don't care about these corporations.
- [89:55]
Jason Snell
You use your iPhone, Alex. It's not hard.
- [89:58]
Alex Lindsay
And the thing is, is that I just don't care about the corporations. I don't care about that.
- [90:02]
Jason Snell
That's fine. But maybe other people do. Maybe other people do.
- [90:06]
Alex Lindsay
Is. Is it.
- [90:07]
Leo Laporte
It.
- [90:08]
Alex Lindsay
The. The friction of Apple TV means that I don't ever go to the App Store. I don't ever look at that I don't ever consider installing something on my Apple TV other than a handful of media things that I watch all the time. And mostly what I watch is just YouTube, you know, like. Like, I just like, okay, you know, And. And the thing is, is that. Because I don't want to.
- [90:25]
Jason Snell
IPhones are more complicated than Apple TVs.
- [90:27]
Alex Lindsay
I know, but I don't. I don't need to. Again, I think that if. If we break this all up, it's not going to be good for developers because. Because it. It gets more and more complicated to buy them, and you start to go, oh, now I got to log in. I got to do this other thing. And it's going to be like one of those things. Like, people will just stop. They will. It will slow down the purchase of goods if it becomes more complicated than just ordering it. And everyone's thinking very short of, like, I don't. I don't want to. I don't. You know, and I don't. As a user, I don't want a relationship with most of the people that I buy my product from. Like, I don't want. I want, I want. I don't.
- [90:58]
Leo Laporte
I want to watch Andor Alex, you're gonna have to have a relationship with Walt and the gang.
- [91:06]
Alex Lindsay
It is really good, I will admit, but I don't watch.
- [91:09]
Leo Laporte
Your Disney plus relationship is important to us. Please hang on the line and when.
- [91:13]
Alex Lindsay
I finish andor, I'll probably. Yeah.
- [91:15]
Jason Snell
And I, I pay Disney for. For Disney plus directly. I don't pay Apple. Apple doesn't take a cut of that. I pay them directly and I log in. And it's not hard, hard to do that. There are lots of easy ways to do that. And I also can't buy books in the Kindle app because there's no way to direct me to the store. But I can buy them in this, in Safari on the scary Internet and then go to the Kindle app and download them, but they can't make a connection and say, look, we do, you know, we sell books on the Internet because Apple would like us to believe that that is some terrible thing, whereas Apple could do it with books. Of course it's fine because then it's Apple. I just. This is. It's silly. Is pretending that the Internet is dangerous and bad. And by the way, there are lots of examples of this. So, I mean, I, I get what Apple, what, What Alex is saying, which is like, there's this kind of platonic ideal of what if everything was just logged in using Apple, but, like, that's not how the world works. And I have and also these arguments like you can't log into Max. Like literally you open up your phone and it says oh, there's your phone logged into Max and then you're done. It's not that hard to do this stuff stuff. And Apple pretending that it's hard and pretending that it's dangerous to let other people use other services using the web instead of making it. And I also don't believe that the argument is Apple can't offer alternatives that are easier. It's that Apple can't only offer its own alternative and no others because that's where it gets messy. So it, and it hurts the user experience. It doesn't help it.
- [92:44]
Alex Lindsay
I don't think. See, we'll see. But I think that if you make it available to all the these, you know, corporations and their little penny pushers and all the other stuff that what we're going to end up with is a thousand cuts of all this stuff that we have to do as a user right now. It's not a problem because we, it's not. Doesn't really exist. As soon as it exists in, in mass it's going to be a pain in the neck. It's going to be. And I, and I will admit that I am very stingy about time. Like I don't want to waste a second on doing, on doing something extra for somebody else doing that when I don't have to, you know, like. And so, and so the thing is, is that, and it will affect the user because when they can make it very hard to buy on, on the Apple products, they will like they, they will because they want to have all that direct relationship. I don't want to give them that information. I don't want to give them the tracking. I don't want to give them my email. I don't want to give them anything. I just want to buy the product and do the thing, you know and, and I think that that is as a user I think people are not going to be very excited about it when, if, if it ever becomes much more widely. I don't think, I think people are going to wish that had we hadn't pulled that Pandora out of that box.
- [93:47]
Andy Inotko
I do think that that's dogs and cats living together. Armageddon sort of reaction to. As an end point. We just disagree with that.
- [93:54]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I just gave Disney all my money so I could watch without ads and they'll probably keep me past antor. You know what really grinds My gears. I wanted to watch Hamilton and there is no DVD of it. You have to watch Hamilton it on Disney.
- [94:14]
Andy Inotko
Yeah. Broadway is one of the areas where like I find my commitment to like, oh no, you shouldn't like pirate stuff, like really faltering because it's like Hamilton is different. But it's like just the other day I was looking for like a Broadway performance that has never obviously was never put on streaming, never released on dvd, VHS or anything like that. But if not for the fact that somebody snuck a camera, like an old school video camera in, we would have no idea what this staging was actually like. So it's like, how can I be like, oh God, oh, I can't believe that you disrespected the stage and the sanctity of the arch. But thank you very much for recording that and posting this because I paid.
- [94:59]
Leo Laporte
Enough for Hamilton tickets on Broadway that I think I deserve a pirated copy of Hamilton. But no, I wouldn't do that. That because I.
- [95:07]
Andy Inotko
And I think it's terrible because at some point, Hamilton, at some point the Disney Channel's. Disney's recording of Hamilton is going to be in the public domain. Yeah. None of us will live to see it.
- [95:18]
Leo Laporte
I'll be dead. But okay, sure.
- [95:20]
Andy Inotko
But like how does that work when it was only ever distributed via DRM controlled streaming. Yeah, like if, if it was released on Bluetooth or DVD at some, or even like on just like the original Star wars movies, if they were released on 35 millimeter prints at some. If someone said, well, guess what, we're not going to give them to you. Well, that's great. We just bought a print of this on ebay and now 300 of us are getting together to remaster it in 4K. What happens at 100 years from now when so many of these movies never were taken, were never was released outside of the original producer's control, how are we going to actually be able to enjoy. However our great grandchildren are going to be able to enjoy Hamilton even though they own it and they're entitled. So that's why. That's why I'll tell them about it.
- [96:08]
Leo Laporte
I'll dandle them on my little knee and I'll say, boys, once upon a time your great grandpappy went to a place called Broadway in the now flooded New York City zone and saw a show about a founding father in hip hop. That was the kind of music we like to listen to back then. We are going to take a little break and then. Oh, wait a minute. No, I can't because first. First, I have an announcement to make. Jason Snell is sleeping with his Apple Watch.
- [96:40]
Jason Snell
True. It's true. It's like Sleeping with the Enemy. I'm sleeping with the Apple Watch.
- [96:45]
Alex Lindsay
God.
- [96:45]
Leo Laporte
Man.
- [96:48]
Andy Inotko
Was a reference to sleeping with the Enemy. I didn't want to put that.
- [96:52]
Jason Snell
Thank you very much. Absolutely.
- [96:54]
Leo Laporte
This is in honor of its 10th anniversary. You decided to go to bed with it. Yeah.
- [96:57]
Jason Snell
So the thing is, Apple wants us to all sleep with the Apple Watch now. That's what it wants. You don't. The Vitals app doesn't work unless you're. You sleep with the Apple Watch. The sleep apnea detection does not work unless you sleep with the Apple Watch. They want you to use it. They've got all these features to tell you when to go to sleep, and then it taps you instead of making a noise when you get your alarm in the morning. That's actually a really nice feature. So I decided to change everything. And my point is that I didn't see much of a benefit from it. Like, the Vitals app tells me things that I don't consider actionable. Oh, you're feeling sick. Well, it turns out you also are sick. Great. Thank you.
- [97:33]
Leo Laporte
Are you sleepy? Because you didn't sleep well last night. That's it.
- [97:36]
Jason Snell
It's like. Yeah. I can look and see how long I was awake in the middle of the night, but I'm not sure that helps. If I had a sleep disorder, sure, I passed the sleep apnea detection. I was, too.
- [97:46]
Leo Laporte
Me too. I was very happy about.
- [97:47]
Jason Snell
I was amused by the fact that once the pollen starts to kick in, my. My breathing disturbances are increased. I'm like, yeah, that's because the pollen is kicking in now. That's what's happening. And.
- [97:59]
Leo Laporte
And this is true of all sleep trackers, though, Jason. I wear the aura, the new Oura ring, and it's. It's basically the same information the Apple Watch gives me. This is what a sleep tracker does.
- [98:11]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [98:12]
Leo Laporte
You're not saying it's worse than other sleep trackers?
- [98:14]
Jason Snell
No, I'm literally saying Apple has done all these things except their software update, which still wants you to have it on the charger over and night. But you're. But I'm not supposed to do that. What is it? Get with the program app.
- [98:24]
Leo Laporte
It is to wear it all night because then you have to charge it like you charge it when you take a shower. But that's not enough.
- [98:30]
Jason Snell
And I don't. I don't like the idea that I don't have a normal charging time anymore because I'm wearing it because it used to be I would take it off and go to bed, and now I have to wear it. So, you know, my. My point with the column was basically like, okay, I tried this, and I personally don't. I don't see why I would bother. It's interesting data, but it's empty data. And I guess that goes to a larger story with a lot of the Apple health data, which is we're compiling lots and lots of data, but very little of it seems to be relevant or actionable. And maybe you just wait around until that moment where something happens and then you say, aha, let's look at the data. But for me, like, the. The only real benefit of the whole thing was that I really love the silent alarms. I think that's such a good feature that it taps you on the wrist, making a noise. That's. That's great, great. But all the other things where they're like, you really need to do this. You know, wear it overnight. You know, my report is it, you know, I. I don't see that I'm getting much benefit from this disruption. And then I have the additional mental overhead of, when am I going to charge this thing? Now? It does, to be fair, it does actually tap you at the end of the. At the end of the night and says, you need to charge me before you go to go to sleep. Which is nice. And. And my colleague Shelly Brisbane wrote a piece about how she has a bunch of sleep issues and sleep apnea, and she finds it. She finds that data to be useful, and that's great. I wasn't saying nobody. I was saying I went through the process of Apple finally breaking me down and saying, all right, I will change everything about how I wear my Apple watch. Because I. Because you get the Vitals app and the sleep apnea detection and all of those things. What did it get me over the last nine months? And the answer is kind of nothing, other than knowing that I passed the sleep apnea test. So that's where we are. I just. I decided after all this time, I never really reviewed the series 10 short review. I like it. It's great. I mean, it's thinner and it's nice and that's great. But the sleep thing, I was like, okay, what did it get me? And. And I'm not sure Apple has provided enough actionable information to justify me changing my habits about how I wear it. So I wanted to get that down.
- [100:41]
Leo Laporte
I think that's true of all sleep trackers, though.
- [100:43]
Jason Snell
I mean, unless you have a sleep issue. If you have a sleep issue and you're trying to figure out why you have bad nights and good nights and all that, it's totally great. But as just a pure routine kind of thing, it didn't really do it for me.
- [100:55]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, I think that's going to be a lot different when Apple really does get its AI together and you can do things like say, like ask Slowmo. I don't know why, but I just completely crashed at 3 or 4 in the afternoon today. And can you think of any reasons why I might have just needed to go take a two hour nap? And then based on all the data, including the sleep data, it can say not just, oh, well, because you're up until 6:30am streaming something and then you had to be up an hour later. But addition, but in addition. Well, here's your activity levels for the, for the days before that. Here is like if you have a food diary, a food calendar, here is all the data that we collected. Yeah, there's something going on there. It's not just. You weren't just imagining it and no, it wasn't just about the amount of sleep you got the night before.
- [101:43]
Leo Laporte
It's always fun for me to fire up my iPhone and pair with my Oura ring and see what a crappy night's sleep I got and how I should probably just take it easy today.
- [101:57]
Alex Lindsay
It depends on, you know, a lot.
- [101:58]
Leo Laporte
Of the time this is the same stuff as you get the watch though, right, Jason? Total sleep efficiency, restfulness, how much rem, how much deep sleep. I got a lot of deep sleep. That's good latency, which means how long a total you to fall asleep.
- [102:09]
Andy Inotko
God.
- [102:10]
Leo Laporte
I got. It took me two and a half hours the other night to go to sleep. That is not good.
- [102:18]
Alex Lindsay
Two and a half hours to go to sleep.
- [102:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's wrong. Yeah, I know. Well, I wouldn't have known that except that I have it recorded right here. Two hours and eight minutes.
- [102:31]
Alex Lindsay
And I admit that like, I guess I've been doing this for as long as it's been there and paying attention to it and paying attention to when I have caffeine and when I eat and when I exercise and when I do all these other things. And at this point, I mean, if I, if I'm awake more than five minutes of laying down, I know it's what's going on. Like, what's going on? Like, like what happened here? Like, and because I stress, I process my temperature. I mean like the temperature of the room. I process everything.
- [102:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [102:55]
Alex Lindsay
I have all that information.
- [102:57]
Leo Laporte
But I love it that the ring said, hey, it's going to be all right.
- [103:00]
Alex Lindsay
But. I will say that my. But watching the data, my sleeping has, as I got focused on it, has gotten much better.
- [103:09]
Leo Laporte
There's some evidence that it makes people anxious about their sleeping, and they're not. And that's not good. So I guess it really, as you said, it depends. Some people it's good. Some people, it's not good.
- [103:21]
Andy Inotko
When you gamify something, people get determined to win the game, and that's not a good.
- [103:25]
Alex Lindsay
I did find. I did find that there's no way for me to sleep as long as I think it's like, you will sleep. I was like, I can sleep six hours. Like, I cannot sleep longer than that.
- [103:33]
Leo Laporte
It said you should have more. Yeah.
- [103:35]
Alex Lindsay
It just says you'll wake up without an alarm at. If you go to bed at like 9, you'll go. You'll wake up at 5 or whatever. And I'm like, I will wake up at three. Like, you know, like.
- [103:45]
Leo Laporte
So the only, the really good thing about the aura is it tells me that my physiological age is four years younger than my chronological age. So I'll take it. I'm really only.
- [103:59]
Andy Inotko
You can still drink. You're good.
- [104:01]
Leo Laporte
I could still, but I. You know what most people know, hey, if I have coffee at four in the afternoon, I'm not gonna have a good night's sleep. And then when you wake up the next day, I didn't have a good night's sleep. You don't need a watch to tell you that. But I guess if you wanted to.
- [104:13]
Alex Lindsay
Know more, I think for me, I found out exactly when, which is 2:00.
- [104:18]
Leo Laporte
Like, it's not like, oh, you know, what time you can. You have to stop. Yeah.
- [104:22]
Alex Lindsay
The last coffee has to be before 2:00, and I'll have one at right after the show because it's my last coffee for the day. And then that's.
- [104:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's fair.
- [104:31]
Andy Inotko
Yeah.
- [104:31]
Leo Laporte
I think, Jason, I agree with you. It just depends on some people. I find the watch useful to kind of gamify my exercise. Like, I really want to exercise every day. So stuff like that.
- [104:44]
Jason Snell
Everybody's. Everybody's different. I just, I was struck by Apple going seemingly all in on the idea that the Apple watch should be worn around the clock other than when charging. And so I, you know, this is the business that we're in. Right. So I'm like, all right. Let's try it. I, like, I can't. I need to try it. And so I did. And while I find value in other things, the Apple watch provides. You know, I think unless you are concerned about sleep apnea, unless you. And you've got a model that supports that or are dealing with a sleep issue, whether it's constant or. Or kind of random, I question whether you need to really adapt to this. And Apple, you know, I get that Apple benefits from sampling you when your body is kind of like at rest and do all of those things. But again, and if. And this is my other point is if I got a bunch of things on my, on my phone that said we've learned things about you. Like there are rumors about where they're going to do more processing of this data, where I learned some important things about my sleep and how it changes based on other aspects of my life, like how much I exercise or how much I drink or whatever. I would find that interesting. But collecting months of, you know, you Woke up at 2am for 10 minutes does nothing to me. It just does nothing for me.
- [106:07]
Leo Laporte
I have to say, Apple did gain something out of this though, because I went out and got a special forever chemicals band so that I would sleep with this on comfortably.
- [106:16]
Jason Snell
Nice.
- [106:17]
Andy Inotko
That's okay because my doctor said that I have a microplastic deficiency so that.
- [106:21]
Leo Laporte
Actually I need more microplastics in my skin sleep. And actually it's a very comfortable band. But the problem is I also have an ultra, which is really problematic if you reach out and clunk your wife on the head with. So by accident. By accident, honey, by accident. Watch did not record that. Although it did say. Did you just take a fall? All right, I'm glad you're sleeping with your watch. You're not anymore though, right? You stopped sleeping your. When did you stop sleeping with your watch?
- [106:50]
Jason Snell
I did last night, but we'll see how long that can. Okay.
- [106:54]
Alex Lindsay
I have a. Since I have a show every morning, I just. That's. That's my time to like, it sits right next to here. So I just like take my watch off.
- [107:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't need to watch during the show. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, just put that. Are you wearing it now, though? You're wearing it now.
- [107:06]
Alex Lindsay
I have a show every morning at 7:00.
- [107:09]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you charge it in the early.
- [107:10]
Alex Lindsay
During. During office hours. That's my. That's my charge time.
- [107:16]
Leo Laporte
And the watch does charge pretty quick. An hour of charge is usually enough to get through the day.
- [107:20]
Alex Lindsay
It feel it Tops it off because it's, it's our, it's. I can go two on my watch without charging.
- [107:28]
Leo Laporte
We're gonna take a break and come back with your picks of the week, folks. So get those ready. And while we're pausing, I do want to mention Club Twit to our dear friends. This is a very important part of how we stay alive. Two ads on the show. That's great. We love our advertisers, they really help. But they don't. They only. Advertising only gets about 75% of our monthly costs in. We need to make up the difference. And I'm very pleased to say what used to be about 5% of our revenue is now 25% of our revenue. Thanks to you, our Club Twit members. However, it is a deal. It's been. We've been doing this for four years. Seven bucks a month. We just re added the yearly. What is that $84 a year plan. Because sometimes people just want to pay once. I have to tell you, I think we're gonna have to raise the rates a little bit because of tariffs. Frankly, advertisers getting a little skittish. So we probably will raise the rates in the next few months depending on what happens with the US economy. I do wanna promise you this. If you're already a member of the club or if you join the club now at the $7 a month, you'll be grandfathered in. It'll always be $7 a month. There are great benefits if you are a member of our club. You get ad free versions of all of our shows. You get your very own ad free feeds. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, a great place to hang out not only during the shows with some really smart and fun people, but also all the time. There's other things that go on in the club like our Minecraft dedicated Minecraft servers. If you're a Wordle fan, you can share your score there without people yelling at you. We're recently added brackets to city because we got smart people in here and we do a lot of events. A lot of events. This week, May 2nd will be photo time with Chris Marquardt. Our theme this month is seasonal. Get your seasonal pictures into Flickr and we'll pick a few and talk about those and talk about the latest photography news. We also have Micah's crafting corner coming up next week, May 14th. Micah does that every month. I don't know if he's still building the Lego succulents, but it doesn't matter. Whatever craft you're into, crocheting, knitting, painting, Lego coding, you're invited to join. Our book club will be later that day. Stacy's Book Club this was a great book. I really liked it. Ursula K. Le Guin's the Word for World is forest and it's short. Even if you haven't read it yet, it's a pretty quick Basically, it's a novella. One other thing we're going to start doing Apple gave us enough grief over streaming their keynotes. We got takedowns both on YouTube and Twitch. We decided, you know what, let's just do our keynote thing in the club. In the club only. So if you want to watch our commentary on the Microsoft Build keynote or the Google I O keynote, or if you want to watch our WWDC coverage, you need to be in the club. We will be doing that in fact, this year because of the club and because it's on a Monday. I think we're not only going to do the keynote, but we'll do the State of the Union talk as well. Later in the day for Apple's wwdc. You saw the giz Whiz is coming back. We're doing a little reunion tour to celebrate his 2,000th show. That's Friday, May 23rd. All of this benefits the club members. Even get a special twit plus feed where we put extra content. 7 bucks a month for all of that. All of the shows ad free, the discord, the special events. If you're not a member of the club, would you do me a favor and join? We'd love to have you Twit TV Club Twit. And thank you for all the support we get from our club Twit members.
- [111:18]
Jason Snell
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- [111:50]
Leo Laporte
All right, time for our picks of the week. Let's start with Jason Snell today. Jason, what do you have?
- [111:54]
Jason Snell
Hey, I I am a an E Reader fan and I write about it a lot and I have a big Stack of. I buy them, I try them, I review them, I do all of that. And with some. There was some news. There was like a software update a couple months ago. I thought I would just do a really quick E reader pick. If you're looking for an E reader now, my E reader of choice is the Kobo Libra Color, which is previously a. A Leo pick.
- [112:21]
Leo Laporte
I love it.
- [112:21]
Jason Snell
It's 229. It's really good. Kobo, good platform. It's not Amazon. That's one of the things I like about it.
- [112:29]
Andy Inotko
The product.
- [112:30]
Leo Laporte
It's got a stylus, too.
- [112:32]
Jason Snell
The color screen is not as good as the black and white screen is. It's a little bit less contrasty. But the processor. So, I mean, I ended up switching to this from the Libra too, because it's so much more responsive. Like in the ui. It just is. They've upgraded the processor on it. And so, you know, whether it's turning pages or going to the menu, everything just is not as sluggish. And so that's enough for me to switch. Really good. And yes, it does color for highlights and all that. I kind of don't care about the color, but some people do. And it does have pen support. 229. However, I have been down on Amazon's E readers for a while because they have gotten rid of all of their E readers with buttons. And I love the physical button because I really love being able to just hold my E reader with my finger on the button, my thumb on the button, and then all I do is squeeze that button every time I want to turn the page. Whereas with a pure touchscreen, you have to re. You have to change your grip and move a finger over. And now it's covering the text, so you can't leave it there. And then you tap and then you move it back. And I just. I think it's not as nice. I think it's not as nice. Well, good news. So I'm going to also recommend if you want to be in the Kindle lifestyle, but you agree with me about buttons for 199. Not the cheapest Kindle. This is the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition. And there are a couple important things I need to mention about the Signature Edition. Edition. Signature Edition. It doesn't have ads on it like the one. The cheaper one has ads. And then you can pay $30 to get the ads to disappear. This version, there's no ads on it and it's got hardware in it that is not in the regular Non Signature edition. Like a light meter. So you can set it to auto adjust the brightness based on how bright the room is that you're in. And it has an accelerometer. And one of the great things about that accelerometer is a new feature unlocked by a software update. Update like a month ago, which is this. If you hold this thing, it has no buttons except for the power button on the bottom. But if you hold this thing and you double tap it on the side or the back, it changes the page. It changes the page. So you can actually hold this thing and not change your grip and go. And it changes the page, like on the side with your thumb on the back with your finger, and it will turn the page.
- [114:39]
Leo Laporte
Does it go backward and forward?
- [114:41]
Jason Snell
No, it only goes forward. If you want to go backward. You gotta. You gotta. But I was. I was actually on a podcast a couple weeks ago where we're saying, why couldn't you just use your accelerometer and sense a tap? And somebody said Amazon literally did that, like two weeks ago, they did a software update that enables this feature. So if you want to stay in the Kindle ecosystem, you're looking for a new E Reader. Kindle Paperwhite Signature.
- [115:03]
Leo Laporte
It is a really good screen. I think it's probably the best screen out there.
- [115:07]
Jason Snell
Yeah. Because this is the black and white screen. And so it is high contrast, high resolution. Resolution. It's really nice. Amazon's improved their software a lot. I switched to Kobo primarily because the Kindle software was so bad. And then they have since made it a lot nicer. And there are good things about it. And there are good things about the Kobo. I like them both. I prefer the Kobo still. I like that it's got a little wide spot where you can hold onto it that's grippy and I love that it's got buttons. But if you want to stay in the Kindle ecosystem, you can do that too. And I think the Signature Edition is actually the sweet spot. I know it's 200 bucks, but you get the light sensor, you get the accelerometer, which means you get the double tap to forward. And no ads. It's a night and a great screen. So those are my recommendations.
- [115:50]
Leo Laporte
And admittedly, the Kobo comes from Rakuten, which is probably as bad as Amazon.
- [115:56]
Jason Snell
I mean. Yeah, maybe so. I mean, the people at Kobo are very nice Canadians, who. I love readers. And that's all they do.
- [116:03]
Leo Laporte
And the other thing, it supports libraries. So I don't know If Amazon does that, I suspect they do. They.
- [116:10]
Jason Snell
It does in a weird. So Amazon, if you check out a book from the library, you basically click through to Amazon.com and then say, send it to my Kindle. Whereas with you, you actually log in with a Kobo to your library using Overdrive. And when you check out a book, it just shows up on your Kobo. So it's sort of like in know, it's. It's either do you want it to all be natively on your Kobo or do you want to just use Amazon.com's web interface to send you a book? They're. They're very similar. It used to be much more complex, but now it's. Both of them work pretty well.
- [116:39]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [116:40]
Leo Laporte
That's nice. And this is the color. It's not, as you can see, it's not very saturated. It's kind of. Let me go the other way.
- [116:48]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean it's fine.
- [116:51]
Leo Laporte
It's. I wouldn't buy it just for the color, let's put it that way. The other thing. Oh, there you go. There's no.
- [116:56]
Jason Snell
But it is state of the art. And the processor's fast.
- [116:58]
Leo Laporte
It's fast. You can see the page refreshes and.
- [117:00]
Jason Snell
If you're a highlighter, you do get multiple highlight colors, which is kind of fun.
- [117:04]
Leo Laporte
You see, I keep my pen attached because I do. I take notes and so forth. I have to say I went out and I got the first Kindle scribe, which is this giant, ginormous, huge Kindle. And for big, it's good. And it also has a pen so you could take notes and stuff. Stuff they say they've got. The new scribe is even better. But I don't know. I like a little thing I can hold. This is kind of hard to hold in your hand.
- [117:34]
Jason Snell
One handed reading is good.
- [117:35]
Leo Laporte
One handed is the thing. Thank you, Jason.
- [117:38]
Jason Snell
Thank you, Alex.
- [117:39]
Leo Laporte
Lindsay, your pick of the week.
- [117:41]
Alex Lindsay
Keep on thinking I'm going to take notes, but I can't read my own writing anymore. I look down, I look at.
- [117:46]
Leo Laporte
Just talk to perplexity and tell it.
- [117:48]
Alex Lindsay
You know, I wrote down something I wrote the other day and I was like, I can't. I don't know what I just wrote there like this. I just got to go back. Yes, Scribble. Yeah. I'm a little obsessed with food supply, I will admit. Just because I think it's. I grew up on a farm.
- [118:05]
Leo Laporte
You know what? Like you, I eat every day now, so.
- [118:08]
Andy Inotko
Every day.
- [118:09]
Alex Lindsay
Every day. I haven't, I haven't Gone that far. You know, I'm working on air most days, and then I break down every couple days and go, well, I'll go back a little bit. But there's a. There's a great thing on Amazon prime actually called Common Ground. And it is. They collected a bunch of actors and a bunch of scientists and a bunch of folks and shot a really good video on just understanding a little bit more about how things are grown and where.
- [118:37]
Leo Laporte
We're so out of touch with our food supply, aren't we? You grew up on a farm, so I think you understand it.
- [118:42]
Alex Lindsay
It.
- [118:43]
Leo Laporte
But most of us, it just shows up in packages at the grocery store, and we don't.
- [118:47]
Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that when you're spreading. Growing up, when you're spreading things that have skull and crossbones on it on your. On the food, you know. You know, like, you go.
- [118:57]
Leo Laporte
You learn.
- [118:58]
Alex Lindsay
You started. I started thinking about it back then. And so this is really talking about regenerative farming and, and not having to. We might not need all the inputs that they tell us we need.
- [119:08]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [119:09]
Alex Lindsay
And those. Those inputs might be showing up everywhere. You know, glyphosate is a really big deal.
- [119:14]
Leo Laporte
I know. I see my neighbors using Roundup and I go, you're gonna kill me.
- [119:18]
Alex Lindsay
I won't be. It's like. I mean, it's worse than smoking. Like, it's. You know, glycerophate is a big.
- [119:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [119:24]
Alex Lindsay
You know, it's.
- [119:25]
Leo Laporte
It's banned everywhere but the US So that's a. You know, you're lucky you can still use it here.
- [119:30]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. So. So the, The. So anyway, so I think that understanding what those things are and understanding, you know, where our food supply comes from, I think everyone should always pay attention and then just decide what they want to do after that.
- [119:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Common Ground. It's on Amazon prime and it's free if you have a Prime account for people who eat and Mr. Andy and Oko, you're our last pick of the week. What you got, Andy?
- [119:57]
Andy Inotko
It is the first Saturday of May coming up this week, and that means it is Free Comic Book Day.
- [120:03]
Leo Laporte
Yay.
- [120:04]
Andy Inotko
This is like an annual event where not just comic book shops, but also a lot of libraries will have, like, free comics. You can just come in and pick up most of the major publishers, the publishers, the Star wars comics, Marvel Comics, a bunch of others, actually produce special comics that these shops can buy for like $0.20, $0.30 each for the purpose of bringing new people into the fold of comics. And because they kind of see it as kind of a big deal. It's not just, oh, well, there's the table that has the free comics. There's an image of three per person, whatever. You can't use the bathroom. Oftentimes they'll make it a big event where they will have all kinds of other stock that's on deep sale. There were if there's a comic book artist that's kind of local or writer who's local, they might come in and do do a signing and do sketches and stuff like that. And once again, it. Although it does cost money for the the shops to operate. So that's a hint that maybe if you want to browse around their store and pick up a couple of things and actually buy things in addition to the free comics, that would be swell. It's quite a thing. It's quite a deal. And so if you go to freecomicbookday.com it will show you about the three dozen titles that are being offered this year. As well as a location finder, you can find the shop or library or whatever nearest to you that's actually holding the event. Like I said, it's a pretty fun day and looks like the weather might be pretty okay anyway. So if you need an excuse to get out on a Saturday and again pick up some Star wars comics, that's pretty good. The other point of this is that a lot of the publishers understand that the people coming in for Free Comic Book Day are likely to be people who have never stepped into a comic book shop in their lives or maybe never read a comic. So. So most of the stuff, it's not like tuning into like 18 years into a soap opera. They put out a lot of comics that are designed to be one and done, like easy onboarding stories that give you a good satisfying experience. So go to freecomicbookday.com and find out if there's a hootenanny happening near you.
- [122:12]
Leo Laporte
Pick up a copy of Post Malone's big rig. I guess he's got a comic. Okay, that's great. Free Comic Book Day. You get to choose the comic.
- [122:24]
Andy Inotko
Yeah, not all comic book shops will have like all of these 36. And sometimes they try to marshal out to make sure that they actually last throughout the day. Once again, just because it's free to the customers does not mean that the comic book shops don't have to pay for them. Again, it's not a lot of money. It's like 20, 30 cents a copy. But still, most shops will pay like 80 or 90 or $100. To participate. So they have, they have a good reason to make sure that if there's like, someone like, like me, like who just like, wants to like, take everything and just take them home, like, maybe they're not the peop. Maybe I'm not the sort of person that free comic book day was designed to reach out to. So they might say, yeah, if you, if, if you, if, if, if you use a hand, if you use the handrail when you go up and downstairs, you're not allowed to take more than.
- [123:13]
Leo Laporte
Two comics, you know, the amazing Spider man will be participating. Incursion, the new ultimate universe's first ever event series Ultimate. Lots of great stuff. Comic book day. Free comic book day. Is it freecomicbookday.com if you want freecomicbookday.com.
- [123:36]
Andy Inotko
It'S been going around for about 20 years. As a matter of fact. It was designed, I think when the first Spider man movie came out out ages ago. Like when fox put out the first spider man movie because it was going to be a big weekend for comic books, they said, oh, you know what, if we use that as a way for people who like, just came out to see this, just went out to see the film on the opening weekend, maybe they're interested in comics to be interested in coming in and reading more about the old friendly neighborhood web slinger. And they've been doing every year since.
- [124:02]
Leo Laporte
Nice. I did not realize that the comic book stores pay for the comics. I feel kind of bad now about. I'm going to pay them back. Thank you, Andy. Thank you all of you. We appreciate your presence on this show. Every Tuesday next week, Stephen Robles fills in for Mr. Jason Snell. Happy birthday to mom. Jason.
- [124:23]
Jason Snell
Yay.
- [124:24]
Leo Laporte
Jason snell is@sixcolors.com his podcasts are@sixcolors.com Jason. And now Mike Hurley is back on upgrade. How exciting. Exciting.
- [124:34]
Jason Snell
It's very nice.
- [124:35]
Leo Laporte
Exciting. That's your tech show with Mike.
- [124:41]
Jason Snell
That's the big tech show. And then just for people who care, last week's episode of the incomparable my pop culture show. We hacked into the net in that we went back to 30 years ago, 1995 and watched Hackers.
- [124:56]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, how fun.
- [124:57]
Jason Snell
The net. Two movies in which computers are proven to be dangerous for society.
- [125:02]
Leo Laporte
But only one has Robert Redford. So you, you choose.
- [125:06]
Jason Snell
Neither of them has Robert Redford.
- [125:09]
Andy Inotko
That's, that's sneakers.
- [125:10]
Jason Snell
Sneakers. An actually good movie.
- [125:13]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you're right. That's the only good one. Okay.
- [125:16]
Jason Snell
Yeah. The hackers. I, you know, I had never seen Hackers before. And I've seen the Net because Mac World Expo is in the Net and there's a Mac user magazine bag in it.
- [125:25]
Andy Inotko
It's amazing.
- [125:25]
Jason Snell
And I was at that event. So it's like.
- [125:27]
Leo Laporte
That's the Sandra Bullock one.
- [125:29]
Jason Snell
Yeah. The name of the company's on it. That, that's not a good movie, but it's got its moments. Hackers I'd never seen before. Angelina Jolie, Johnny Lee Miller. It is. It is delightful. It is. It knows how ridiculous it is, whereas does not know how ridiculous it is. So I, if you're, if you're a fan of those, you can listen to us talk about those silly movies from 30 years ago.
- [125:49]
Leo Laporte
I. I will have to watch them both and then listen.
- [125:52]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah. 1995 was a real banner year for crazy movies about the Internet. And we're actually going to do. What are we going to do? Strange Days next. That's a good movie about the Internet from 1995. In 1995, Hollywood realized the Internet, it's scary and new and let's do a thing about it. So they did many, many things about it.
- [126:16]
Andy Inotko
Hackers has one of my favorite, like nerd, but really bad nerd lines from someone who does not know technology where they show someone's showing off their new laptop to Angelina Jolie say, oh, and it has.
- [126:29]
Jason Snell
Yeah, Michael Stipe is in there also, I would say lots of Macs. Both these movies are just full. This is from the period where Apple was falling apart and about to go out of business. But they spent so much money getting Macs into places where they did not belong in movies. Like movies about computer hackers where they all use Max. So that is delightful. So much beige, so much, much light gray mid-90s Apple Max. It's. Yeah. Anyway, so we did the incomparable mothership double feature Hackers in the Net.
- [127:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, now I want to see it maybe tonight. The Hackers.
- [127:06]
Jason Snell
Hackers.
- [127:07]
Leo Laporte
Hackers.
- [127:08]
Jason Snell
It's ridiculous. I had a lot of fun watching Hackers. It's just ludicrous and fun.
- [127:12]
Andy Inotko
Yeah.
- [127:13]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jason. Jason. Thank you, Andy. Nothing to report here on anaco.com at this point, but you could follow him at Bluesky and he will let you.
- [127:23]
Jason Snell
Know he's doing it. He's doing it. See, in secret. He's doing it.
- [127:27]
Leo Laporte
I'm getting emails closer to the surface.
- [127:29]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it's happening.
- [127:31]
Andy Inotko
The, the, the super secrets super tight alpha group is about to expand into the slightly broader Beta group.
- [127:37]
Leo Laporte
Nice. So nice. Nice, nice, nice.
- [127:40]
Jason Snell
We're get.
- [127:40]
Andy Inotko
We're getting there.
- [127:41]
Leo Laporte
Ih na.
- [127:42]
Andy Inotko
I want to make sure there's stuff for people to see when I open the doors.
- [127:45]
Leo Laporte
No, it's completely legit. I understand that. And of course, Mr. Alex Lindsay, office Hours Global. You're always there every morning.
- [127:54]
Alex Lindsay
Every morning. And I was on, I got interviewed over the weekend. Some, some folks from office hours would have their own show called the Last Angry dj. And so we talked about it, we talked about radio, so radio and, and, and process and what it was like in the, you know, the music business in the late 80s and early 90s when I was in radio. And so it was, it was a fun, fun conversation. So if you want to listen to me tell stories I probably shouldn't have told. Yeah, last, Last Angry DJ is a. I told a couple stories and I, I almost went back and said, hey, I think we should cut this, this and this. And I decided, good, good. So good.
- [128:31]
Leo Laporte
Let it all hang out, Alex.
- [128:33]
Alex Lindsay
Let some of it hang out. I was a crazy time. That's all I got to say. 8 Music Director. As a 21 year old, you do a lot of crazy things.
- [128:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You were a kid, you know you're not responsible. You can't be held responsible.
- [128:45]
Alex Lindsay
Turn 21 and then you never have to pay for a drink. That's all I gotta say. If you're a music director, if you're a music director for an R and R parallel. I'm just saying that you don't have to pay for drinks.
- [128:55]
Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay's on The Last Angry DJ, episode 61 on YouTube. There you are. There you are. Are. All right. Thank you gentlemen. Thanks to everybody who joins us. We do Mac break weekly Tuesdays 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. You can watch us. We're back on TikTok. It worked, right? We got TikTok. I have a little machine over here in the corner that's running TikTok all by itself. An entire Dell poweredge server and all it's doing is running TikTok just so we can stream that. It's on Discord for the club members. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. You can watch us live if you wish. If you do watch live, you can at least chat with us live. And I pay attention to the chat room during the show. So it's great to see all of you in there after the fact. Download shows, audio or video from our website, Twitter, TV, MBW. When you're there, you'll see a link to a YouTube channel dedicated to Mac Break Weekly. Great way to share clips with friends and family and turn them all into things. And of course the best way to get is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You could choose from audio or video or both and then you'll have it ready to listen to whenever you're in the mood for a little Mac Break Weekly. Should I buy or rent? Hackers is $15 to buy, only $4 to rent.
- [130:20]
Andy Inotko
Less money the better. If you can. If you can just sort of like get somebody to watch it for you and then just like facetime their screen.
- [130:32]
Leo Laporte
There you go. There you go. That in other words, worth pirating or not?
- [130:39]
Andy Inotko
In theory I should. Let's. Let's put it this way, worth like going on ebay to find it for like a dollar 25.
- [130:46]
Leo Laporte
There you go. I can go down to the old video store down here. They're selling VHS cassettes for cheap. Maybe they'll have it.
- [130:52]
Andy Inotko
There you go.
- [130:52]
Leo Laporte
It's right about that era. Thank you. Thank you everybody for being here. Thanks to our club members for making it all possible. And we will see you next time. But now I am sorry to say it's my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye.
- [131:08]
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.
- [131:25]
Leo Laporte
Twit, you can watch the video version.
- [131:28]
Jason Snell
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.
- [131:43]
Alex Lindsay
Have.
- [131:43]
Jason Snell
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.
- [132:17]
Leo Laporte
Hey friend. I know how this feels. Waking up exhausted after multiple trips to the bathroom and feeling embarrassed by sudden leaks. I used to be constantly on edge, searching for a restroom whenever I was out. Then I discovered Better Woman. I was skeptical at first.
- [132:35]
Alex Lindsay
First.
- [132:35]
Leo Laporte
But two months in, everything changed. I experienced improved bladder control, no more heart stopping moments when I laugh or sneeze, less urge to go deeper and more restful sleep. I finally felt like myself again, confident and in control. Better woman is natural, effective, clinically tested and trusted by Women for over 25 years. Ready to take back your control? Head over to bebetternow.com to order your supply today. That's bebetternow. Com. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Use as directed.
- [133:15]
Jason Snell
Individual results may vary.