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MacBreak Weekly 978: Half-Baked Bread Is Still Dough
02:27:48
The New Features and Updates to IOS 26 Beta 2
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are all here. We're going to talk about beta 2 of iOS 26 and Mac OS 26. It's a little toned down from the first beta. Also a big anniversary. The fifth anniversary of Apple Silicon and the 45th anniversary of the infamous Apple typewriter memo. 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 978, recorded Tuesday, June 24, 2025. Half baked bread is still dough. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news with the Apple Triad. Our peerless prognosticators of perpetual pomdom. Mr.6colors.com himself, Jason Snell is in the house.
- [01:05]
Andy Ihnatko
Purple, Leah, Purple.
- [01:07]
Leo Laporte
The purple you are. For you, our peerless purple prognostic code.
- [01:11]
Andy Ihnatko
Word is purple for my peerless purple prose. Thank you.
- [01:16]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jason. And also here, he's not purple, he's black and white. Basically red, green from Pixar. Mr. Andy Inaco in the library where it is sweltering hot. Don't they have AC in the library?
- [01:31]
Alex Lindsay
They have really good AC in the library. So much, so much so that it's kind of. Yeah, it's literally, it's like a 10 to 15 minute walk and I'm like, I could drive but no, I did the right thing and I walked. It was suffer, it was, it was something real special. I am, I am, I'm not joking. I am not wearing a single like stitch of natural fibers today. It's like the performance like anti humidity shirt and the performance anti humidity, you know, overshirt that I'm not even wearing. I've even got like the nylon pants on that are tailored to look like regular pants but are not fooling anybody.
- [02:09]
Leo Laporte
How nice and, and how, how are you? How is the sweat being wicked away from you?
- [02:14]
Alex Lindsay
Well, I'm not feeling it. I mean it's causing a problem for anybody to my left.
- [02:19]
Leo Laporte
Everybody around you knows also here in the beautiful powerless. No, you have power in the powered Marin county of California at the moment.
- [02:30]
Jason Snell
At the moment we entered the season earlier. Usually it was August where you start prepping for. I'm going to lose power once a week. You know they call them wind, they.
- [02:39]
Leo Laporte
Call them PSPUs, right?
- [02:42]
Andy Ihnatko
I know personally it's PSPs. It's power safety. It's a public safety power shutdown.
- [02:49]
Leo Laporte
Public safety power shutdown.
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Jason Snell
I pronounce it wtf. That's how it comes out.
- [02:55]
Andy Ihnatko
Basically, if you are unlucky enough to be Alex and be in an area where there are some lines on your, you know, whatever circuit, whatever part of the grid that are out in wildfire country and it's going to be windy. They, they now since many of the fires in California have started because of power lines, they de energize some of the lines, which sucks if you like Alex, especially on those lines.
- [03:19]
Alex Lindsay
They put.
- [03:20]
Jason Snell
They put almost all of those underground where I actually live. But. But we're on.
- [03:24]
Leo Laporte
Oh, really?
- [03:25]
Andy Ihnatko
You're on the same circuit underground up in the hills.
- [03:28]
Leo Laporte
That's the problem is it's not. Yeah, it's at the head end. Hey, this is a big anniversary this week. Five years ago at wwdc, Apple made a surprise announcement that they were dumping intel for Apple Silicon. It would be a few more months before the Apple Silicon computers max came out, but this was a big story and now we are five years down the road and I have to say, I would say amazing success. You agree there?
- [03:55]
Alex Lindsay
Absolutely. It's almost as if we were reacting to the news that, oh, by the way, the iPhone is now going to be available in a rose gold that's a little bit more rose gold next year. It was for something that was so titanic in its scope, it was just, oh, well, if you have an existing Mac, it's going to work fine for the foreseeable future. If you buy a brand new Mac, it's going to work really, really great, immediate, without any pain points. I mean, the transition from PowerPC to Intel wasn't nearly as smooth as this. And it was pretty smooth. Good job.
- [04:30]
Leo Laporte
In fact, so smooth that they're phasing out Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer in the next generation of macOS.
- [04:39]
Andy Ihnatko
They like to use that and try to clear out the old software that's not being updated anymore. It's a little. I've got to think that there's some sort of overhead or some sort of licensing cost. The idea that if you've ever tried to run an intel app on. On a Apple Silicon Mac, it wants to install Rosetta, which suggests to me that they're keeping track of Rosetta installs. And that means that they're probably paying somebody a licensing fee for something that they'd rather not do forever. And so you end up sort of saying, look, this is the end of it and forcing people to migrate to other apps that are not.
- [05:14]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, I mean, either the app developer can fix it, but it's not unusual. I've seen a few Apps say, well, okay, that's good, we're done, goodbye.
- [05:22]
Andy Ihnatko
The good news is most of the apps that were going to be in this, I mean there are going to be apps that die. But the fact is there was the 32 bit transition that happened with macOS Catalina. That's the one that really was the. Speaking of wildfires, that was like the prescribed burn that burned away all the stuff that was still on ancient APIs and stuff. Anything that is running on Intel 64 bit today, there's a project, there's an Xcode project somewhere with that app in it. And so yeah, there's going to be some abandonware, but I don't think there will be that much because that the Catalina thing that hurt. And people like our friend James Thompson had had, was doing Drag thing for years and years and years. He does pcalc and that's still around. But drag thing was this great Mac utility, but it was 32 bit. It used a lot of old technology. And when they announced the Catalina transition, he said that's it, it's done. And a lot of apps kind of died at that point. So. And a lot of people thought, and we may have even talked about it here, a little conspiracy theory is Apple did it then so that their Apple Silicon transition would not be seen as being as cataclysmic. So they, they got the cataclysm out of the way a couple years earlier.
- [06:32]
Leo Laporte
That makes sense. It was kind of, it was a one, two punch.
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Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah.
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Andy Ihnatko
So they just took the 32 bit stuff away first.
- [06:38]
Jason Snell
I mean, the chip, what they announced five years ago was in, in development for a long time.
- [06:43]
Leo Laporte
Well, it was already in the iPhone. Right? In the iPad they had Apple Silicon.
- [06:47]
Andy Ihnatko
In fact, there were two iPad Pros that came out that were using those, what, a 12x and a 12z which I think Apple has even said that was their like test bed for what if we did a higher performance version of our iPad and iPhone chips, put it in the iPad Pro and they were really just kind of revving the engine to get to the point where they did M1 and then, I mean we can remember back five years. Were there any bad reviews of the Apple Silicon M1 Max? Like they were, they were so superior in every possible way.
- [07:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, and it didn't just affect the Mac users, it changed the PC industry. Because everybody, look what's happened to intel in the intervening five years. Everybody looked at this and said, this is. We are not getting anywhere near the battery life, the power per watt, of course Mac Silicon, Apple silicon had NPUs, neural processors, ML processors built in. I mean, this was a big shift. And the entire PC industry said, whoa. I don't think they expected it. Once these computers came out a few months later, I think everybody in the PC industry said, we got to read intel back to the drawing board. Qualcomm all of a sudden becomes a leader. It took them a few years, but their Snapdragon elite now is coming a little closer. I don't think it's there, but almost close to Apple Silicon.
- [08:08]
Andy Ihnatko
It's a great example of how sometimes, and it doesn't always happen this way, but sometimes Apple, because they control more of the inputs into their products than most companies, Apple can make a decision with. I don't want to say courage, because I feel like Apple ruined that word for everything, but really, like, Apple can say, look, we are confident that these ARM processors that we're designing are going to be able to handle Mac workloads. And yeah, there are issues with GPUs and external GPUs and the memory architecture. And like, there are all those things that they built for iPhone, but they're like, we think this is going to make great Macs. And they were right. But they also, by demonstrating that a lot of the, you know, the industry that was never going to make that step looked at them and said, okay, it's safe for us to make that step. And that's a way that Apple's, just because of the way they're set up, they can lead the industry there.
- [09:01]
Jason Snell
And doing something that's completely vertical like that is crazy. Unless you're Apple.
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Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
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Jason Snell
You know, there's really nobody else that should do what Apple's doing. We're just trying to own that entire. Like, they're, they're only doing it because they got to a certain point where they're at a certain scale. They have enough of their market is all set up that way. But it, you know, generally this kind of vertical alignment is. And I, I don't think that they're done. You see them looking at the cell, at this, all the different chips that are in there, and they talk about all the external chips, like, as legacy chips, you know, like they're, you know, that they, they. I think that they envision somewhere in the future there's a piece of silicon that is your phone that's just inside the screen. Like, like there's not. There's not a bunch of little chips. There's not. Or, you know, there's, there's not that Many other little things. I think that it may take them a long time to get there. They may never get there. But I think that that's the, the North Star for what Apple wants to do is just build a chip that does the thing and own every piece of that, of that chip. And there's just a chip inside, you know, with a couple things that external, that tie into the other things. And I think that they'll just, you'll just see them keep on rolling that up because it just gives them an enormous efficiency. And again you can only get that if you're at their scale. If you're making 75 million of something is the only time you can do that kind of thing. And almost nobody else is doing that.
- [10:13]
Andy Ihnatko
I just wrote this morning, in fact a piece that'll be on Macworld site later this week about this very subject. So I'm glad you brought it up. Leo. I'll point out that it's not just the fifth anniversary of, of Apple announcing their transition off of Intel. It's also the 20th anniversary of Apple announcing its transition onto Intel.
- [10:34]
Leo Laporte
Oh wow, that's a good point.
- [10:35]
Andy Ihnatko
Which was WWE 2005.
- [10:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
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Andy Ihnatko
Where they. And and then it's not quite because it was 94 for when the first Power Macs came out. So this is the third big chip transition the Mac has gone through in that time I was chuckling, I actually went through the archive. I've got a bunch of old Mac week story text from back then and I was, I was looking through it and it's funny, the PowerPC transition which for those who are not around back then they went for the Motorola processors, the 68000 series that was in the original Macs. And then in the early 90s they went to PowerPC which was a company, it was basically the Apple, IBM and Motorola alliance. So Apple was doing research into risk processors and so was IBM and they came together and they brought in Motorola to make this new generation of processors that they felt would compete better with what intel was doing with 486 and Pentium and things like that. And if you read the stories as I did from like 94, 93, you see that, that Apple was dissatisfied with the pace of, of chip transformation growth and speed increases and was frustrated that they didn't have any control over it and that their entire product was controlled by a single suppliers plans, which is Motorola. And I'm like that's literally the story every single time this has happened. Because Then with Power PC the story is that IBM was building those G fives and said that they would go to 3 GHz which they could never reach and the G5 couldn't go in a laptop. And everybody was very frustrated. And that's the moment that Steve stood on stage and said true and unveiled the intel thing, which got them a lot. And in those early days of intel, like Apple erased. For people who don't remember that era, like Apple erased the whole issue of like, but Macs aren't as fast because they were having those issues. Now Macs would always be as fast as a PC because they're using the same chips. It also was just in that early moment where the ipod was big and the iPhone was about to be big and the intel processor meant that you could run a virtual version of Windows on it at almost full speed, which allowed people who are rack curious but afraid of losing that important Windows app that they had to use to, to take the plunge because it was always there. And I think the truth is most of those people never actually did use that Windows, that parallels or VMware thing that they installed. But it was there if they needed it. And so it was like perfect timing for them. But forward 15 years and Intel's pace of, you know, intel kind of lost the lead. Its pace of change really reduced. TSMC was coming on. And the big difference is, of course Apple had spent the past decade working with tsmc. They were designing chips and TSMC was building them. So that that transition five years ago was like the biggest no brainer for Apple because they'd already gone through it. They already knew how they were going to do Rosetta. You know, they controlled their development environment. Another Lesson learned from PowerPC where Metrower code Warrior was the software used to build PowerPC apps on the Mac and not controlled by Apple. Not great. So they did xcode and they've got Xcode for everybody know it's if there is. I wrote a piece about this maybe five years ago and I said, you know, I don't, I'd like to believe that there are people at Apple who worked on PowerPC, the PowerPC transition who are still there and, and, and like have got this down to a science now this is the third time, but that's a long time. And I heard after I wrote that piece, I heard from somebody who's like, oh yeah, there are a bunch of us here who are, who, who were here back then and like it's no, no company. I mean to take a whole platform and move it to a completely different chip architecture is a big deal. And they've done it three times and it was fine all three times. And I think again, other to Alex's point about Apple, like having the extra difficulty in doing, you know, more stuff than anybody else, like the fact that Apple just three times has said, yeah, there's better chips over there, we're going to go over there and have. And has nailed it all three times.
- [14:33]
Jason Snell
And, and at this point, and I think it does get better and better. And I think one of the things that makes it better is that they own the os, they own the development platform, you know, as you said, the development platform. And by owning all of those stacks, it makes this much more smooth in a way that makes it very hard. It makes it very easy for them to continue to innovate. Especially as they pull more and more chips into the system and more and more of the hardware into the system. It makes it much more. Now they have to stay in front of everybody. The danger of what Apple's doing is that they can easily, you know, suddenly not be able to produce as fast as their competitors. There's given verticals like not being able to keep up with the, you know, a variety of the modem chips or, or other things like that. That's going to be, that's, that'll be a challenge when you start doing it all in one. But there's a, the advantages from like just merging the CPU with the, you know, with the GPU and then having them sitting on the same chip as the ram. You can make a lot of mistakes and have that work well because it's just so efficient because it doesn't have to slow down to the bus.
- [15:36]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. And the other thing, that part of the story is we forget that intel, boy, Apple was just not a subject of Intel's intention for a number of years there where time after time, like, why are we getting this new MacBook? Well, because intel promised Apple they'd be able to deliver this CPU generation by X date and they completely failed to do that. So it wasn't just Apple. It's very true that Apple always wants to control everything wherever they can. They don't like relying on outside anybody for anything. But nonetheless, it was like, we are going to die soon if we are at the whim of Intel's ability to execute their roadmap.
- [16:13]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And they knew at that point they had been, they had spent, you know, 8, 9, 10 years designing their own chips and building them with TSMC and had gotten their legs under them. I think, you know, if you would ask Johnny Sruji and his team and in 2014 or something to build a Mac processor. They'd be like, you know, maybe, but by 2020 it was like a done deal. Right. And obviously they had been working on it for a couple of years and, and like, so they, they went in with confidence. So my only question is like is in 10 or 15 years is there going to be another chip transition? And the answer would be it would have to be cataclysmic. Something cataclysmic would have to happen. But you know, life comes at you fast, you never know. But Apple seems to be right where they want to be, which is building.
- [16:57]
Leo Laporte
First time their own. Right.
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Andy Ihnatko
In a package. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because Apple, IBM controller, the AIM alliance was, you know, Moto was building those chips and then IBM was building those chips and Apple was involved, but they had to rely on partners. And, and I mean you could argue that this is similar, but the TSMC is a much better partner than IBM was ultimately for the G5.
- [17:19]
Leo Laporte
It's conceivable that either tariffs or Chinese retaking TAIW could put TSMC in jeopardy.
- [17:26]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. But even then I think what you'd see is Apple taking its design and getting a fab. Even if it had to go back to an older chip node, legacy nodes out there, they could do that and build those chips in the US or whatever.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.
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Andy Ihnatko
Or go to, or go to Samsung and have them build them in Korea. Like there are, there would be options, but that would be under the line of cataclysmic.
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Jason Snell
Yeah, and it would be, it'd be cataclysmic. But I think that Apple, Apple could spend $50 billion on making the shift if they had to. You know, like it's, that's a, that's the kind of number that very few companies can just do, you know, flip the switch and in a year be somewhere else.
- [18:04]
Leo Laporte
It's been a huge success and ironically you can now run intel stuff pretty well, in fact Linux stuff pretty well on the new Tahoe because it has a container with Linux on it. And so, you know, and truthfully, even if you're running Windows on ARM on an Apple, it often runs better on Apple Silicon than it does on the opposite Options for Windows PCs. Windows on ARM runs great in fusion on my Mac. On my M3 Macs.
- [18:33]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's the other part. I put that in my Macworld story a little bit too, is that the funny thing is getting off intel means you don't have that really convenient Full speed Intel virtual machine. But guess what happened? Now you've got Windows that will run on ARM and you can use their version of Rosetta, which is very good actually at taking Intel Windows apps and running them on arm. And so here we go. Right? Like Apple kind of led, led the way. But in the end you can still do that and it's pretty great.
- [19:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. This isn't the only anniversary you mentioned the PowerPC transition. But who can forget the infamous Apple typewriter memoir which came out 40 years ago. I guess it's not really an anniversary. It says February 1980. So maybe this is an old article, but I do love this. Yeah, it is an old article. It's 45 years ago now. Apple is an end of. This is from Mike Scott, then CEO. Yeah. Then CEO of Apple from February 1977 to March 1981. In February 1980, he decided to write this memoir. Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word of processing is so neat, then let's all use it by January 81. No typewriters at Apple. Ken, get rid of the DEC word processor ASAP. By the way, if you give up your typewriter, you'll get the latest Apple II + Apple II writer system and first priority on new Apple high performance systems.
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Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I wrote a lot of words in Apple Writers. That was their own word processor that they had for a long time.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah.
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Alex Lindsay
Was the 80 column card a thing in 1981 yet? Or they still. We still stuck with 40 columns. I want to say 80 columns came with the Apple IIe.
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Andy Ihnatko
The 2E could do it.
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Alex Lindsay
It was built in. But I know there was a. You get a card for the two plus.
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Andy Ihnatko
Maybe so. Maybe so because.
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Alex Lindsay
Because like if in an office full of Apple II pluses that did not even have upper and lowercase and 40 columns, you have to make sure that everybody has upper and lowercase and the ability to see an entire setup.
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Andy Ihnatko
Get that shift key mod in there. You get that? Yeah. But I love it. Right. That's dog fooding though. He's like, if we believe in this stuff, we got to live it. Good for them.
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Leo Laporte
And incidentally, Apple was developing the Lisa at this time. I know that seems pretty early, but they already had a Lisa team working on a graphic interface and all of that.
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Jason Snell
So what's amazing is that I look back on it, I was thinking about when I was in school and when the. When I got an apple IIE. I think when I was I think 13 or 12 or 13 and. And that was the last time I was talking to somebody, a teacher, I was like, that's the last time I hand. That's the last time I did cursive. The cursive. I never did cursive again.
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Andy Ihnatko
Oh, yeah. Again.
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Jason Snell
Because the teachers didn't care that I was. Back then. They weren't sensitive, like, oh, people have to learn how to do cursive. It was just like, really easy to read.
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Andy Ihnatko
They might. Yeah. In 1983, 84, in eighth grade, I talked to my teachers and I said, I would like to print. I bring you a printout of what I wrote on my computer on a dot matrix printer. And they said, yes. And in hindsight, I look back and think my handwriting is. And was so terrible that as weird as it must have been to get these things printed out on the computer, they were probably relieved that they didn't have to try to decode my chicken scroll that I was doing.
- [21:59]
Alex Lindsay
I can probably top that in that I was. I think I'm probably the certain, certainly the first student in my entire school system to submit a paper electronically. Because I had like, English at like 11 something and it was finished. I wrote it at home, but I didn't have time to print it. So I said, hey, I can give it to you like after lunch as I go to the computer lab during. During lunch and like, print it out. And Dr. Terence Earle's beloved, beloved English teacher said, da, da, da, da, da, da. I've got an Apple II at home. Why don't you just give me that disc that has paper written on it sneaker.
- [22:33]
Andy Ihnatko
Net.
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Alex Lindsay
And fortunately, it wasn't a bluff. So he actually had it.
- [22:37]
Leo Laporte
That's pretty cool.
- [22:38]
Alex Lindsay
But that was he. Yeah, yeah, he was very proud. That would have been. Oh, God, 83, maybe make me feel so old. Yeah, he wrote. He wrote a.
- [22:49]
Leo Laporte
Well out of college before that. I did bring a typewriter in 1973 to college, and I left with the typewriter. I don't think there were computers, but I don't think we were submitting papers digitally by then.
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Andy Ihnatko
My college newspaper, my first job in my college newspaper was as a typist. And it was literally people would bring me typewritten manuscripts or things they printed out from their PC or whatever, and then I would retype them into Microsoft Word on an Apple or on a Mac SE in order to get. So we could put it in PageMaker and lay out the newspaper. And that was. Every now and then somebody come in with a Mac disk and it was like they were a conquering hero returned from Afar, where they're like, I have a disc with my story on. And we're like, oh, it's so good otherwise, you gotta retype it yourself. That was, boy, the primitive days of 1989.
- [23:41]
Leo Laporte
The period of time you'd go into the announcer's booth or the sports writers booth at a Giants game, and there'd be a row of TRS 80 Model 1 hundreds. And they were typing on these little flat. They weren't laptops, they were flat computers. They were wedges. And then they had a modem port. And they would finish the story.
- [24:04]
Jason Snell
They would.
- [24:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they would connect to the coupler.
- [24:08]
Alex Lindsay
Actually put the handset in this rubber molded thing. Yeah.
- [24:12]
Leo Laporte
And upload it from there. So we come a long way.
- [24:17]
Alex Lindsay
It's wonderful to trace that history. I own three typewriters, and one of them is like the laptop version, like the Smith Corona skywriter from like 1940 something, 50 something. They've made it for 20 years. It was for like the traveling salesman or the traveling reporter or something he could, like, carry from place to place to place easily. And it really is about the size of the chunkiest PowerBook that Apple ever made. Maybe just a little bit thicker, but it's like, yeah, at some point, the idea of having a mechanical typewriter that was slim, lightweight and portable was actually a very, very attractive product.
- [24:55]
Leo Laporte
Well, as long as we're talking about the end of an era, you can see here my Mickey Mouse glove grabber on my spreadsheet. You know, you forget about the fact that those three lines indicate that that's a glove. And then when you grab, you grab with a glove. This is it. It's over for the glove. Tahoe has eliminated the three lines and somewhat simplified it. The gloves.
- [25:19]
Alex Lindsay
So you see, they realized we added an element of fun and whimsy, and we simply can't have that.
- [25:25]
Leo Laporte
Someday you young people will be looking back, you'll be doing a show like this with a bunch of oldsters. Say, remember when the glove had three lines on it? Remember when we had gloves?
- [25:37]
Andy Ihnatko
Incredible.
- [25:38]
Leo Laporte
It's incredible. Also, by the way, FireWire may be dead in Mac OS 26. That's according to USB.
- [25:46]
Alex Lindsay
Killer got killed by USB.
- [25:49]
Leo Laporte
Wow. How am I going to charge my original ipod?
- [25:53]
Alex Lindsay
Exactly. It's like this. This is what. This is why you, like, every time you look back on that huge, huge box of just random ancient cables that you keep meaning to throw out, suddenly.
- [26:04]
Jason Snell
You'Re like a couple of them. Got a couple four hundreds, couple eight hundreds, couple. You know, like, you got to Have a box.
- [26:09]
Leo Laporte
They probably had cameras, right? With their IEEE 1397, lots of them.
- [26:14]
Jason Snell
I mean this was a huge, the FireWire was a huge revolution. And you know, Apple got all these camera. What was really interesting is that Apple, you know, FireWire was free to use and Apple got all these camera manufacturers to adopt it. Like now you can just plug the camera in and just digitize directly from the camera to the, to the computer to imovie and other people will use it and blah blah, blah blah blah. And Apple got all these camera manufacturers to support it and build it into their system and then they, then they charge $2 for licensing fee for the computers, not for cameras, but for computers. And what that did and people oh, that'll kill the format. And that's not what happened. What happened was, is it kept all the PC manufacturers from adding FireWire to their computers. And it meant that Apple basically had free run of Fire. You know, if you're doing video, you couldn't use a PC.
- [27:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I remember people.
- [27:04]
Jason Snell
I talked to someone that might have been there at the time and I was like, this seems like the dumbest thing I've ever seen. He goes, well no one's going to be making videos on PCs anytime soon. But they first had to get the, the camera manufacturers all loaded up and building them because once you get them building them, it's years of distribution.
- [27:22]
Alex Lindsay
For years I had this Franken cable that was plugged into my cable box because when TV went digital part of the negotiations with Congress was that hey, but you still have to allow people to record things just like a vcr. So the concession was okay, how about we put a FireWire port on the back of cable boxes that if you are an incredibly technically savvy person and know where to find a piece of open source software, then you can actually capture video coming right off of your cable box. And I needed like fire, but again to make sure that no one could use it. It was like FireWire. I needed FireWire to like Thunderbolt to something else to actually get it into one of my Macs. And of course it stopped working at some point and I just, I could have sued, but I decided it was too big for that. But yeah, FireWire. The thing is, it's certainly past time to lose whatever baggage FireWire is creating. But even when you decide oh ha ha, firewire, no one's been using that, oh God, how am I going to sync up stuff to my original ipod? There are guarantee you a significant non 0 number of people that are like, but I have this one thing at my facility that requires FireWire. And so suddenly, like this Franken cable becomes the most valuable piece of property in the entire chemical plant. Because if we lose that, we lose access to this data. Data collection device that is absolutely essential to keep. Essential to keep people in the plant and in the community alive.
- [29:00]
Leo Laporte
FireWire started 400Mbps, topped out at 800Mbps. That was the fastest Apple ever offered anyway. And now Thunderbolt 5 tops out. 100 times faster at 80 gigabytes. Actually, that's 800 times faster. 800 gigabytes per second, that's a lot faster.
- [29:20]
Jason Snell
I think it's 80 gigabits.
- [29:21]
Leo Laporte
80 gigabytes, or is it gigabits?
- [29:24]
Jason Snell
Okay, well then it would only be 10 gigabytes.
- [29:26]
Leo Laporte
It would only be 100 times faster. Sorry.
- [29:29]
Jason Snell
So fast.
- [29:32]
Leo Laporte
All right, we're going to take a break, come back. There is more to talk about. Lots of rumors, lots of rumors. But first, a word from our sponsor. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Inocco, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsey. Our show today, brought to you by StoryBlock. If you've ever worked for a publication or in a marketing company anywhere where you've gotta put content on the web, you know the pain of legacy content management systems. CMSs, they promise enterprise great features, but you know, usually in my experience, you get slow, clunky systems that need developer support for even the smallest update. And when you're trying to move fast, that's the last thing you want to do is file a ticket. StoryBlock, our sponsor, changes all that. Unlike those monolithic CMSs, StoryBlock is something called Headless. This is so cool. It completely decouples your backend from your front end. So developers can work in any framework they want for the front end. React, Astro Vue, whatever. While marketers, you do get an incredible visual editor. So marketers get to use this, you know, easy to use intuitive visual editor to create and update content. And they have full control. They don't have to file a developer ticket. If you want to move something over 5 pixels, do it. Storyblocks scales whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise with a global cdn, AWS data centers in the US and Europe and Asia. It's built for performance at scale. And of course, StoryBlock is enterprise ready. They've got all the features Fortune's 500s demand, role based access control, enterprise SLAs and absolute top tier security. One global e commerce giant switched to StoryBlock and cut content Update cycles from weeks to hours, from weeks to hour. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns completely independently, freeing up devs. Because you know what? The devs don't want to have to to come to the rescue either. So the devs got to work on bigger, more interesting projects and you get to do what you need to do. Storyblok has an API first approach. That's the key. You write the front end to access the back end through the API. That means your content loads fast anywhere in the world. It means a better UX design, it means higher engagement, improved SEO. And with their real time visual editor, everybody's happy. Marketers see exactly what their content will look like before publishing. No more endless back and forthing over minor tweaks. And devs get fewer interruptions. Markets get more autonomy. It's a win win. Ooh. If you're an agency, you're going to love this. Storyblock offers multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. You can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. So whether you're a startup and enterprise or an agency juggling multiple clients, StoryBlock gives you the power and flexibility you need. Try it today at storyblock.com twittv-25 use the code TWIT25. TWIT listeners will get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That is storyblock.com twittv dash25 the code is TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plants. S t o r y dash b l o k dot com twittv dash25 the offer code is TWIT25. I think you'll love it. Storyblock. I thought this was kind of interesting. Apple executives I use my favorite AI is a kind of mashup of all the AI is called Perplexity. I even use it for web searches. Apple executives apparently, according to Bloomberg, have had internal talks about buying Perplexity, which one market analyst said would immediately change their attitude towards Apple from a hold to a buy.
- [33:39]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that was bank of America by the way. That would be a $14 billion buy at their current valuation, which is about 10 times greater than their biggest. I think Beets was their was beats.
- [33:52]
Jason Snell
Their biggest three point something or other, I think.
- [33:54]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and it must be nice to.
- [33:56]
Leo Laporte
Be Perplexity right now because Meta tried to buy them earlier this year. They are hot.
- [34:02]
Alex Lindsay
But that it's, it's interesting in that they would get, they would basically get a pre Cooked like Marie Collander's pot pie. Like, it's all, it's all set. They've got stuff that's actually working. The big question would be though, is like, like, could they integrate a unit, a team like this into the Apple culture or would they just be there to train the people who are already at Apple? They'd keep a few of them and the rest of them would just be like, I'm contracted here for five years, but I am so out of here as soon as we're done. Apple is such a unique culture that, I don't know, it would be weird to figure out how the team that accomplished everything that they've accomplished as their own independent company could continue to function that way as an integrated workforce inside Apple.
- [34:49]
Andy Ihnatko
So I mean my, my issue with Perplexity is it's a product company, not an LLM company.
- [34:56]
Leo Laporte
Although they have their own custom something around.
- [34:58]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. But they mostly are using other models. And so this doesn't get to my mind. If Apple were to buy perplexity for 15 billion or whatever, 20 billion, whatever they ended up having to offer, I mean, they'd get some good press. That's probably not worth 20 billion. And I think they wouldn't get the thing they need the most, which is probably help internally building models. Although I don't know the state of their current thing. But fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Like, they haven't really shown that they're great at that. So is this an injection of talent to build products that doesn't actually solve their underlying problem? And does it really solve the fact that they, you know, are they struggling to integrate? Because in a lot of ways Apple does a pretty good job of integrating ML features in their operating systems. I. The thing that struck me about this is that they have their search product and if you're in an era where Google Search as the default may be in trouble based on court rulings and that AI search seems like the future. I do wonder if Eddie Q looks at Perplexity and says, hmm, maybe that's our future search engine is something that we could own.
- [36:09]
Alex Lindsay
Nice.
- [36:10]
Andy Ihnatko
And uses other technology from other companies too, but that we, you know, it would be our AI system on top of it. I think that's interesting, but I'll come back to it again. I don't know if buying Perplexity solves what might be the biggest underlying problem, which is that Apple does not seem to have cutting edge people building models and that over the last few years they probably lost Anybody who wanted to be a cutting edge person doing models to some other company. So it's, it's a weird fit. Also, we should mention a lot of stories about Perplexity being bought came out last week. Like there's been an organized plan by somebody to really stir the pot and get people talking about Perplexity. Yeah, yeah, I do wonder about that. But like if I were at a queue I'd be talking to them too because just on the search part alone it's an interesting possibility.
- [37:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I use it for search as well as for a model. I pay 20 bucks a month for Perplexity Pro. This is the choice of models you get if you have the Pro version. Perplexity has its own they say sonar fast model which is probably somebody else's model that's been adapted. They do offer Claude 4, the latest version of Claude GPT 4.1 Gemini 2 point. So you get access to all of the latest models. You even get Perplexity's own reasoning model. In fact, Perplexity recently added a research tab. It says if you're willing to wait a few minutes and sometimes it's as long as 10, you can ask it to do a big research task. And it's been. I used it before I went to my doctor and found it very useful. One of the things that Perplexity does well and maybe Apple would be interested in is the fact that it doesn't really often hallucinate. I can pretty much trust the test the search results because it's using the web as a backup. It's kind of retrieved what they call retrieval augmented generation using the Internet. So it's pretty darn accurate.
- [38:14]
Andy Ihnatko
The general sense is that people think Perplexity has done a good job of building a product and building it on top of some other models is that what Apple wants should also say that in the, in the the member discord it pointed out that I that that aphorism that I learned from Scotty and Star Trek, I said it wrong because it's fool me once, shame on you. You shouldn't fool me, fool me twice, shame on me. I shouldn't be a sucker to believe that you wouldn't fool me again. I feel like that's where I am with Apple's AI efforts is you got to have that added skepticism of they're not. It's not a first cut at it. It's like they kind of blew it. But now are they the case or not?
- [38:48]
Leo Laporte
The top guy from Google, John Giannandrea.
- [38:50]
Andy Ihnatko
I know, right?
- [38:51]
Leo Laporte
And Everybody, we all said, oh, this is going to be great. And it's. It didn't pan out.
- [38:55]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [38:56]
Andy Ihnatko
Although in the end they do have a lot of really impressive AI stuff. This is the thing that gets flattened when we try to simplify what's going on with Apple and AI. Apple has for years had a lot of really good AI stuff and they still do have a lot of good stuff. But in that key moment when LMS were starting to blossom, the people at Apple who are in charge of AI and I think they've kind of turned their nose up at and was like, well, that's just silly nonsense. Forget about that. And they miss their moment. And now they got to catch up and can they. Did they blow it? Did they turn off a lot of people? Do they, can they hire people? Do they need to acquire?
- [39:28]
Alex Lindsay
Hire?
- [39:28]
Andy Ihnatko
I think that's, I mean, it's very hard to say this on the outside, but like, perplexity to me, on one level, they're doing what Apple should also be good at, which is taking, you know, stuff and making products out of it. And if they're not good at that, then it's maybe a good purchase. And that's why I mentioned the search stuff is like integrating into Apple's OS's, I think is something that Apple's probably going to be able to do. I think they're, I think they're good at that. I think that's actually what Apple is, is general good at. But the search thing is a great example of like, that's just a product that they haven't built. And if they're really concerned it might be worth 15 billion, I mean, how much is the search business worth to them that Google's paying them, what, 20 billion a year for that? Like it might be worth it to get. Boom. You've got your own AI powered search that you can wire up to every Apple device. Maybe. But like, I don't know, it just, I.
- [40:22]
Leo Laporte
That's a big swing though. You go from getting paid 20 billion a year to spending 30 or 40 billion.
- [40:30]
Alex Lindsay
And because you're Apple, you're not going to be able to monetize it the way that Google has been able to monetize it through.
- [40:34]
Andy Ihnatko
Exactly. You'd have to do it yourself instead of having an intermediator to make all the money off of all those people who are using your products. Yeah.
- [40:41]
Alex Lindsay
And that's why you have to bury your own bodies from now on.
- [40:43]
Andy Ihnatko
And my spider sense, the reason why spider sense is tingling about this is mostly because it's it on its surface, Apple buying an AI company kind of makes sense. If they could get an infusion of talent in an area where they have a deficit, that's great. But the, the more you look at what Perplexity actually does, and it does a good job at what it's doing, but it feels like the wrong. Like this does. It would be a splash, but like, is this where Apple needs the most help? I'm not sure it is.
- [41:12]
Jason Snell
And I still think that. I don't think it's the same. I think that a lot of the press and I think that Apple last year got into this thing where Apple. It's an existential threat for Apple. And I still will keep on saying it's not like I'm using plenty of AI all over my Apple devices. I don't feel like I'm missing a whole lot. It's not like I don't have a high expectation for Siri to do anything. So it's not really like. But it doesn't matter. What am I going to do? Go to another operating system? So I don't think Apple has the. And because one thing that Apple keeps on doing is the lock between all of these different services and all the different things that you have is so tight that if you've bought into that, you're not going anywhere, you know, and so not anytime soon. And so I think Apple has a lot more time and I think that this long play, the short play, they're not good at, they're not going to be able to do that. And I think that it was a mistake for them to say that they could. But the long play, if I'm going to put, you know, they own the operating system, they own the development system, they own the hardware. Being able to tie more and more of AI stuff into something that's happening on device that's more secure, that's less expensive, that, you know, all those other things is a huge advantage that they have potentially two years from now or three years from now, where they don't have to negotiate with anybody, they don't have to talk to anyone about it, does it? And as long as they can get the release valve of making it easy to talk to other AI tools, you know, the integration with other AI tools which we're seeing in xcode and we're seeing other places, really makes all of that that I think work really well. And I just don't think that. I don't think a lot of AI. It's just not the same like Google, it's absolutely the same. I barely use Google Search now. Like, you know, like it's just a very rare thing for me to search. In fact, I sometimes search and then I go, what am I doing here?
- [42:56]
Leo Laporte
What do you use instead?
- [42:59]
Jason Snell
So it depends on what I'm doing. So for images I'm typically using Mid Journey, but I'm also using Cling and Leonardo. And then for coding, I'm still kind of of in the cloud.
- [43:09]
Leo Laporte
But for search, what do you use?
- [43:11]
Jason Snell
ChatGPT. Like I have, I literally hit a, I hit a button and I say Janet from a good place. Like, Janet, where is this? And, and I, I take pictures. I like, I take pictures as like, this isn't starting. I don't even tell it what it is.
- [43:23]
Leo Laporte
My problem with replacing Google Search is, and this is true of Perplexity, I get a lot of AI stuff. All I want is links.
- [43:32]
Jason Snell
Oh, see, I don't want the links.
- [43:33]
Leo Laporte
You don't want the links.
- [43:34]
Jason Snell
I just want the data. Data, like, just like, I don't care about the links. I don't, I don't care about.
- [43:38]
Leo Laporte
You're not looking for a site then, you're just looking for information.
- [43:40]
Jason Snell
I will, I, I am, I am generally just aggregate now if, if I don't, if I want to check the veracity of that. ChatGPT is handing me links of what it's based on the whole way through.
- [43:51]
Leo Laporte
Same thing with Perplexity. That's all trustworthy.
- [43:54]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [43:54]
Jason Snell
So I can go, I can go look at it and obviously I'm going to buy something or do something. And usually when I'm asking Chat GPT for something, I'm going to know it's real or not in about 10 seconds later, because I'm asking how to do something I'm about, you know, like, that's like 90% of my searches. I'm like, I'm like, it's gonna get, it's gonna get tested by reality really fast, you know, and so, and I find that.
- [44:15]
Alex Lindsay
Is that how you put out a grease fire? ChatGPT?
- [44:18]
Jason Snell
I don't ask ChatGPT for that.
- [44:20]
Leo Laporte
So, but so while it does feel like this is, these are placed stories, it is the case that when Eddie Q was on the witness stand during the Google trial, he said, we've been pretty impressed. This is a direct quote from Bloomberg. We've been pretty impressed with what Perplexity has done. So we've started some discussions about them, with them, about what they're doing. So maybe that was the seed for this Bloomberg story. Or maybe Perplexity's been calling around saying.
- [44:46]
Andy Ihnatko
They don't need to buy it. Right. They could be talking to them about a deal to use their search.
- [44:52]
Leo Laporte
And incidentally, when Perplexity was asked, it made a statement. We have no knowledge of any current or future M and A discussions involving Perplexity.
- [45:00]
Jason Snell
Exactly how you see it.
- [45:02]
Leo Laporte
And that's how you should say it, by the way, because who was the company that prematurely announced that Apple was going to buy them and it fell apart immediately? Right. I can't remember who it was, but it was not a good thing to do.
- [45:15]
Alex Lindsay
It's the sort of company that you would forget who they were at.
- [45:18]
Leo Laporte
They immediately sank below the surface. Yeah. Jason's good piece on using an iPad for making podcasts.
- [45:27]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah. I decided not to do like a stunt and secretly do this episode and I'm just using a Mac for this. But I could, I mean, you could.
- [45:37]
Leo Laporte
If you wanted to. You and Dan Morin did your Six Colors podcast.
- [45:41]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah. The big deal here, I mean for, for those who don't know, is that a lot of podcasts and video shows, not this one, because we use Zoom and it all just sort of is recorded live. But a lot of them, you've got people on unreliable connections. And when you're doing something like Zoom or any other voiceover ip, it prioritizes latency over quality. So like it doesn't. If, if, if you sound a little bit bad, but you sound immediate, it's better than if you're lagging three seconds behind the conversation, but sound immaculate. It just makes sense. Right? The problem is for a podcast, you want it to be immaculate and, and so those two things are different. Like real time communication versus having a super high quality recording are different. So a lot of podcasters, they do the conversation on a VoIP app and they record locally their full quality audio and video. And you could never do that on the iPad or the iPhone before because of multitasking reasons. And in 26, they built in this, this feature that it's at a system level that'll let you press record when you're doing a Zoom call and your mic and video will be recorded to your device full quality. And then you can, can use, you can email it to somebody or put it on Dropbox or whatever, literally anything you want to do with it. And so we did this, we tried it out and I, I had some nerdy tech specs. So basically like it's, it's an MP4 container, but it's FLAC audio inside. So it's un. It's compressed, but it's un. What is it? Lossless compression. So it's full quality, no compression artifacts at 48 kilohertz. So it's like full range audio. And then, I don't know, we. Ours was audio only, but like it's going to give you an MP4 video coming right off of whatever your camera is.
- [47:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so you could do video too?
- [47:30]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, absolutely. It'll, It'll, it'll generate both for you. So it's just another thing that it's like they're checking off the boxes of like, reasons why you might not use an iPad and or iPhone. This actually, I think one of the most exciting things about this is if you want to do a podcast with somebody and they're traveling, they can bring a little USB microphone and attach it to their iPhone and do a podcast and give you a full quality file at the end.
- [47:53]
Jason Snell
And the problem we've had before is either you had to compress it a lot or you had and, you know, you had to compress it a lot to get it out. Or breaking up all the time with 5G or WiFi or whatever. Exactly.
- [48:03]
Andy Ihnatko
You hear the dropouts? I can, I mean, as a podcast editor, I can hear when somebody does something on. On used to be Skype. Now it's zoom. I can hear those dropouts that back in the day, so many people just recorded the Skype call and you could hear the dropouts.
- [48:15]
Leo Laporte
I could hear them in my nightmares.
- [48:17]
Andy Ihnatko
I know, right? And so, so this is more work. But it's. It is the highest quality audio that you can get. And the iPad, because the iPad and the iPhone just were not made for multitasking. It just wasn't. It wasn't there. And rather than like doing an API, I mean, the truth is an app could be written for the iPad that does this, but that's the problem is that all the apps that, that people use don't do this and they're not apparently going to. So instead Apple just put it in the system and let you do. Let you take control of your own device. It's a great thing and it's even better than I thought it would be because it is like full, uncompressed or losslessly compressed audio in that stream and importing that file into an editor, there's nothing to it. You drag a file in and it just imports it. Like there's nothing special about it. It's nothing weird about it. It's just an audio file. So it's one less thing to worry about when you're doing, you know, if you're with an iPad or an iPhone and not on a Mac.
- [49:11]
Jason Snell
Did you test anything about how to start everybody at the same time, or is that still something?
- [49:15]
Andy Ihnatko
That's it. It's not like that. It won't do syncing.
- [49:20]
Leo Laporte
It doesn't matter because when we've done Double Enders, they drift anyway. So you still have to resync all the time.
- [49:25]
Andy Ihnatko
You do. You do have to do that. I've got a tool on my Mac that does that and everybody asks for it. And I say, the author of it, who shall remain nameless. It's not. It's not me, it's one of my friends, doesn't want to release it publicly. So, Okay, I can't share it with you, but it's not a problem.
- [49:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it looks at the waveform and matches them up.
- [49:45]
Andy Ihnatko
It matches them up. It's amazing. But I can't release it to anybody. I've got a whole automator thing where you click on a file and you say, sync it and it syncs it, and it's amazing. But I can't ever release it.
- [49:54]
Leo Laporte
Such a holdout.
- [49:55]
Andy Ihnatko
Every year I ask him if he'll let me release that somewhere. So, anyway, the weird quirk about this feature is, and I think it's a privacy thing, which is great, is it only works when you have an active VoIP session. So, like, if you press Record and your Zoom call hasn't started yet, it doesn't record your audio, it doesn't record your video, because no app on your system is asking for your microphone. Once an app asks for your microphone or your camera, like Zoom, when a session starts, then the recording starts. So it's very specifically only when some other app is. You can't use it to just, like, record your thoughts. Right. That's not what it's for. You should use an app that does that. This is to ride along with some other app and give you a local recording of just you. And it doesn't record the other end, it just records you. But that's super useful.
- [50:46]
Leo Laporte
That's all you need. That's what you want.
- [50:47]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And so, like, for podcasters, if you use Zoom, you can do a cloud recording, the quality isn't good, but you've got a backup of everybody that you can refer to later if you want to.
- [50:56]
Leo Laporte
And tools like Riverside FM will do local downloads as you're recording and then upload them. So there are tools that will do.
- [51:03]
Andy Ihnatko
This There are tools that will do this, but you have to have an app that is right that everybody's got that, that is specifically written to do this. Yes, that. That's the truth of it is all Zoom has to do is upload its local recording. They could do that it makes to their server so you could download it and they would solve this problem. But this is why Apple built this tool.
- [51:23]
Leo Laporte
Is that a lot of listening? Careful.
- [51:26]
Andy Ihnatko
I mean, a lot of these apps, they just. Their priorities are elsewhere. And I understand why, but as a podcaster, I just want to press record.
- [51:33]
Leo Laporte
There's no audio Hijack Pro equivalent for the iPad.
- [51:36]
Andy Ihnatko
You can't do it because There are no APIs to control any of the audio stuff in there. So you have to. This is what you do. Apple has to do it. And so this is Apple's solution. And I tested it and it works great. So, like, check it off the list of reasons why you can't travel with an iPad.
- [51:51]
Leo Laporte
I want to take a break and then I need your help because I don't want to get in trouble. Apple put up on YouTube a video of a presentation for parents. It's actually for kids to present to your parents to convince them to buy you a Mac. Apple has pulled it down. I have really goes back to. It's an old trope in advertising. Goes back to. Well, remember this guy?
- [52:16]
Alex Lindsay
Dad.
- [52:17]
Leo Laporte
Hey, it's me, Steve. This year, to avoid any confusion, I'm.
- [52:21]
Andy Ihnatko
Putting my wish list on video. All I want is a computer.
- [52:25]
Alex Lindsay
Now, hold on, dad.
- [52:26]
Leo Laporte
It's just $849 for all this.
- [52:29]
Andy Ihnatko
A Dell computer, speakers monitor, one year.
- [52:32]
Leo Laporte
Of MSN Internet access, Intel Pentium 3 processor.
- [52:36]
Alex Lindsay
He got to meet Bill Clinton, too.
- [52:40]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think Apple's was a little more sophisticated. We'll talk about it in just a moment, but I want.
- [52:46]
Jason Snell
John.
- [52:46]
Leo Laporte
Ashley, can you contact our legal department and find out if I can play it?
- [52:50]
Andy Ihnatko
Done that in advance.
- [52:51]
Alex Lindsay
And they advised me for you not to play it.
- [52:55]
Leo Laporte
Is there any way I could play it just for the club?
- [53:00]
Alex Lindsay
It means your call in the end. Ultimately, I can tell you what you.
- [53:03]
Andy Ihnatko
Shouldn'T do, what you should do, but you have.
- [53:06]
Leo Laporte
They're so humorless. They're so humorless. All right, well, if you're in the club. Actually, Mac Pro Connecticut already uploaded the TikTok, so you can watch it for yourself. And we're just going to have to leave it to your imagination. It's a TED Talk.
- [53:22]
Alex Lindsay
Would you like to do a professional.
- [53:24]
Andy Ihnatko
Reenactment of the commercial?
- [53:26]
Leo Laporte
No, it's a TED Talk. I can't. And the guy there's special effects. Could I play it without the audio?
- [53:34]
Andy Ihnatko
No.
- [53:34]
Leo Laporte
I hate this. Because we know it's perfectly legal. It's what they call fair use. But fair use is merely the right to hire an attorney. And John Ashley is not admitted before the bar in the state of California. So we're just not gonna play it our show today. But we have other stuff coming up on Mac Break Weekly. We're so glad you're here and watching our show today. Brought to you by Cash Fly and when I say brought to you by Cash Fly, I mean literally brought to you by Cash fly. For over 20 years, Cashfly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery. They're a CDN, a content delivery network serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And by the way, there are CDN at TWIT. We've been using CashFly for almost 20 years. If if you know. And the good thing is you don't even know because you don't notice that your downloads come in fast. And you never have a problem watching the video on our website or any of that. That's the beauty of it. Cash Fly is one of those things that's so good you don't notice it. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. The proof is in the petabytes at Cashfly. By the way, we do more than a petabyte of downloads a month on Cashfly. Events stream smoothly. In fact, you can get less than 1 second of latency streaming to more than a million concurrent users worldwide. That's pretty darn good it. Online games start 70% faster, scale instantly, play without lag, software downloads flawless during releases, patches and updates. Yeah, you don't want your patches to get caught in a hiccup. HD video plays on demand with ultra fast sub second start on every device. And one thing we know about users, they're impatient. If it doesn't start right away, they go somewhere else. And Cashfly has helped us and many other podcasts reach global audiences and record speed at any scale. We never have to worry about it. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. And by the way, you could do something now that we've been doing kind of privately for a long time at Cashfly. Put your site content in their cloud. By doing that, you ensure 100% cash hit. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, oh man, you get the VIP treatment. It's like gaining an extension of your team. Believe me, when your entire business model like ours depends on delivering massive amounts of content, you don't want to go it alone. We tried. Then we found Cashfly. You should too. You can count on personalized help anytime from a tenured expert who gets IT Engineer to Engineer 24 7. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com Twitten C-A C-H-E F L Y.com Twit thank you Cash Fly. Thank you very, very much. Darn. I really want to play that video. It's pretty funny. Now why did Apple put up the presentation in the first place and then take it down?
- [56:48]
Jason Snell
If I was a marketing person trying to get to that market, I would put up a video that was pretty rough and then I would take it down immediately. Like that is they. And then if they wanted it off TikTok right now, they take it off TikTok like that, you know, like it is on TikTok.
- [57:02]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [57:03]
Alex Lindsay
They did pull it down from YouTube and they pulled down a repost that was. That someone else did.
- [57:07]
Jason Snell
Well, it's sitting on TikTok with a lot of views. No one's gone after it. I, you know, I, I don't know. I don't know if, if the put up and takedown was necessarily an accident. Like I don't like, I mean someone who's worked on these kind of commit campaigns, like that's a not, it's not something that's never been done before, you know, so because it's seen as the. You can decide whether you agree with it or not. But, but I'm just.
- [57:28]
Leo Laporte
It could be a viral attempt to go viral.
- [57:30]
Jason Snell
Definitely. Definitely. We wouldn't be talking about this ad if it was. I don't think we'd be talking about that if they didn't take it down.
- [57:36]
Leo Laporte
Well, we might because it's kind of interesting. But you're right, it's certainly much more interesting.
- [57:39]
Alex Lindsay
It's lame. It's lame and it goes on too long and it's just, it's real like 1990s Apple marketing, which is. Yeah, but wait a minute. That's not true. That's kind of true. But you have to be very. But only for certain types of Windows machines. And the idea of like an adult, okay, 26 year old, but an adult giving a lecture to a classroom of teenagers convincing them, talking to them about how to convince their parents to buy a Mac is in itself like maybe not the Best way to do that. And also the idea of, of I'm going to market. It's creepy that Apple would do a campaign like this, complete with like PowerPoint Keynote and Google Slides presentations to give to their, to give to kids saying hey pre 18 year olds who are actually controlled by a whole bunch of consumer marketing laws. We want you to harass your parents into buying you a Mac for college. It's not a good look. I yield so much to your expertise and your opinions, Alex. That's a really expensive way to play a really big trick. I don't.
- [58:57]
Jason Snell
Only Apple had the money.
- [58:58]
Alex Lindsay
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just. Well, no, things cost money. It's, it's and it's, it seems like a lot to go through for a video that they're hoping will go viral and people will, I mean it's, we'll take it down enough to make it look like it's viral.
- [59:15]
Leo Laporte
They certainly scared me from playing it right.
- [59:17]
Jason Snell
That part worked with creative. I don't think that that would be more than six or seven hundred thousand dollars, which. Oh my God, like I don't think, like, I don't think. But I mean when in the grand scheme of things I've been paid, I've been paid that much money, do 10 seconds like, of stuff, you know, so it's like not a. And, and so I, I don't know if like it's not, it's not a big number. I mean it's, it's, it's a number but it's not a big number for a company that big.
- [59:41]
Alex Lindsay
I'll also say to be fair, the, the SNL comedian who was, who did the video, Martin, Martin Hurley. It's still on his social media. It's still a one minute clip. It's I think seven minute video and a minute of it is on his TikTok and I think it's also on his Instagram. Whereas the precedent to this was when Apple has a series of international videos about like a small business team that uses Apple products and they travel a lot. And there was one where I think that the team went to India or something. I might be wrong, but they went to some country and then had to pull that ad like, like very quickly because the government of that country said hey, you're basically calling us like a dirt, jerk, water like place that causes nothing but problems for business people. We don't like that. And that really did.
- [60:32]
Jason Snell
I think Apple's definitely got some tone deaf. I mean obviously there was the crushing of the, of the, of the instruments. So I think that Apple, you know, does make mistakes. I'm just saying that when you put something up like that one doesn't look like it's so bad that they put it up and took it down. But maybe I will accept this.
- [60:47]
Alex Lindsay
I will accept it as a, as a credible, credible theory. I'm not sure if I, I just.
- [60:52]
Jason Snell
Don'T know if it's any different to me than, than the Samsung ads about Apple phones and stuff like that. I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of in the same. To me, it's in the same. Like what? I don't think, by the way, I don't think it's a great ad. I don't think it's a great video. I don't think it's, you know, I think it's like, okay, you know, I also think though, that any teenager that gets a PC should have to build it so that they, they actually know how it works. Like, my son has a PC but he's. He built it. And if they can't, if they don't know how to build it, they should probably just use a map like they're going to get from a virus perspective and paying attention to things and everything else. I do think that. So I agree with the overall tenor of that. I don't think that kids shouldn't have PCs. I think they should just build them. That should be the. This is how you have earned your way into owning a PC as a kid. Where you're going to go to all these crazy websites and everything else is you should actually know how it works.
- [61:36]
Leo Laporte
They're saying it was done in PowerPoint. It can't have been. There must have been Keynote, right? Or no, is it a PowerPoint presentation? That would be pretty.
- [61:44]
Jason Snell
PowerPoint. That would have been part of the joke, I'm sure. But.
- [61:49]
Leo Laporte
Well, maybe Apple just knew that Andy would pan it and they just thought. They didn't want to avoid the embarrassment.
- [61:55]
Alex Lindsay
Of having they fear and loathe Mes Thompson of Apple.
- [62:00]
Leo Laporte
They read your mean tweets. That's what happened from Engadget. Apple read your mean tweets about Liquid Glass and Finder. Jason, have you installed the second developer beta? Because apparently they've kind of toned down the Apple glass.
- [62:14]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, they're working on. The Mac was the most unfinished of all of them and they're working on. I mean, it's a work in progress. They're still like, there is what Apple wants it to be what was implemented For Developer Beta 1, what feedback Apple is getting. There's a lot going on here and it's going to shift over time, which doesn't mean that it's not worthy of being discussed and, and, and criticized. But also it's, it's a moving target and a, and a work in progress. And I would, I would say if this was a student's paper, I would say it's a draft. Right. They really do in a lot of ways get some, some people are really angry. They're like, how dare you say it's a beta. They shipped it to people and we should criticize it. Well, you can criticize it, but I feel like you need to understand that it's not the public beta. And even the public beta is not like, I will write a story that is review like in July about the public betas, but it won't be called a review because like it's still a work in progress. The final is what they ship as I guess 26.0 of everything. Now that's weird. And, and so we'll have to see. But it's making progress. I've been running, I think all the betas are actually surprisingly stable. And the Mac one, parts of it are weird, but other parts of it are really nice already. And, and on the iPhone that, that you can see what they're trying to go for with the liquid glass thing because it makes the most sense in a way on the iPhone.
- [63:37]
Leo Laporte
Oh, this just in. Apple does offer a PowerPoint keynote or Google Workspace version of that presentation that you can download on the website.
- [63:49]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I put a link to. They pulled it from the, from the Apple website, but of course because it's Google Sheets, like it can get shared everywhere, so. Oh, there's hysterical.
- [63:58]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so it's not on the website anymore, but it was for a while.
- [64:01]
Alex Lindsay
Okay, I have a link in the show notes that's hysterical. And it's all. Has all this guidance of oh, right here, make sure you type in your major and over here change it to this.
- [64:12]
Leo Laporte
That it's like, okay, so this, this is. There are changes in iOS. This for instance, is the beta. This from 9 to 5. Mac on the left is the first beta. The second beta is on the right. And there is less translucence. It's.
- [64:26]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they're, they're tweaking the settings. It's much more legible what they want. And, and, and that is all going to continue. There's a big thing in beta 2, so the Mac menu bar by default has nothing behind it. And obviously everybody was going to complain about that because of course they are. So there is a setting in beta 2 that lets you put, you know, basically a translucent strip behind it so it looks like the menu bar again, which I actually don't. I don't have any legibility problems with that invisible menu bar now. But it's very weird because I have a window at the top of the screen and then there's space above it where I can see my desktop picture. And I feel like I want to move my window up there, but there is still an invisible force field. They should have a little like. Like it's a Star Trek brig or a Star wars force field or something like that, because it's just. It kind of breaks the metaphor. And I kind of feel like what they really want you to do is set it to auto hide, which I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever do. But if you set it to auto hide, you can put the window all the way at the top and they don't care. But anyway.
- [65:28]
Leo Laporte
So now you have my menu bar set to auto hide on the current Mac os? Well, I don't. I like it disappearing, but that's partly because I also show the screens on the air and I don't want any cruft.
- [65:39]
Andy Ihnatko
It's. It's. It's fine. I just, I, As a longtime Mac user, I like my menu bar scene not heard, but seen. So anyway you can. So they're tweaking it. So they added a setting where you can just put the stripe up there, which is. I think that's good because of course there's going to be like a utility. There are already a couple utilities that do it. And I'm like, It's like, it really should just be a setting. You can have it off by default, but it should just be a setting because some people are going to want the menu bar to. To be. Not invisible. And you can do that. So there. And that's. That's DEB Beta 2, that I would say those are changes that were probably in the works before they even dropped beta 1. Right? Like, before we even saw it, they were probably already working on it.
- [66:18]
Alex Lindsay
The thing about the first developer releases, like, I always think of it as the Monkey House release, where, like, they've been developing this in. In quiet, in silence and isolation. They don't know. Again, they've been working inside the Monkey House for so long, they've got used to the smell by now. And it's only when. Okay, we're going to put it out. And you absolutely should expect that there's going to be a wave of rollbacks or minor changes almost immediately as. Okay, now that it's outside the monkey house, people. Oh, my God, why is it so hard to see, like, beyond this layer of frosted glass? Oh, my God, why does the macOS logo look like. Like that guy who got arrested for selling body parts out of human body parts out of Harvard University who has this half of his face tattooed blue. All these little things. And so it's fun when the second release comes out to see all the things that were rolled back or adjusted. And that's absolutely going to be expected. And as Jason said, we're talking a lot about this as it happens. The dev1 release is quite useful. I don't know if I'd call it stable, but it's quite useful. I've had it on my own research phone for the past week and I haven't had any real problems with it. But it's not even the first public beta. It's the first public beta where you start to. We're going to start to think that, okay, this is the Jello has set. This is pretty much what Apple intends to ship. Now it's just a matter of looking for edge cases and bugs to get rid of.
- [67:46]
Jason Snell
And there used to be an NDA connected to this like Apple's. You know, people wouldn't have 100 bucks. What?
- [67:53]
Alex Lindsay
Sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. You can only get it by being like an actual. Paying $100 a year.
- [67:59]
Jason Snell
Yeah. And there was an NDA like, you can't talk about it. This is, this is work in progress. And the. Apple's loosened that up a little bit. And now they have all these people throwing tantrums and going to social media and. But it gets them. You know, a lot of people are talking about it. That's, you know, any press is good press to some degree, and they'll see the progress. I think that's.
- [68:16]
Andy Ihnatko
And I bet you the idea, I.
- [68:18]
Jason Snell
Bet you they were also in the middle. Some of this stuff is there in the middle of an argument between two different teams. And they go, hey, you know what, let's just go. We have two different versions of it.
- [68:24]
Leo Laporte
Who goes first?
- [68:25]
Jason Snell
You know, and we'll put them one out that we're not sure will go, well, see what people think. And then we go, oh, no, we have another idea. Because developing a whole bunch of new things from version one to version two that quickly, that doesn't Happen. That happens over months and months and months of time.
- [68:38]
Andy Ihnatko
I've said for a long time that, you know, when we, when we all talk about this or write about it and we say, oh, Apple should do this and Apple should do that, it's not like an executive hears our words and is like, oh, you've changed my heart, Andy. Now I'm going to do things in a different way. The truth is there are people inside Apple who have real disagreements.
- [68:57]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [68:58]
Andy Ihnatko
And. And they hear us talking about it, or there's an article that comes out that they can point to and say, see? And it helps people win arguments. A lot of what we do ends up just being kind of fodder for people on the inside to say, I told you that wasn't true. Why didn't you listen to me now? And that does lead to change. It's funny, they are paying attention to what people say about it and they do use it, but that's sort of how it works, is, you know, Apple wants to portray itself as monolithic and like, there's only one opinion and this is it. But the truth is, if you have a disagreement with something Apple is doing, arguing. Somebody inside Apple has also disagreed about that, but they don't have the clout to make it to win the argument. And maybe public reaction, press reaction, gives them more clout to do that.
- [69:43]
Jason Snell
Yeah. I've talked to folks inside, not necessarily Apple, but inside of other companies that, that I felt bad. I was like, I'm sorry. I really. I said, I really went off on your. On your product. No, no, that was a huge thing. We clipped it out of Mac Break and put. And sent it to a bunch of.
- [69:57]
Alex Lindsay
People, you know, like, you know, I'm sure we all have those stories. And it's actually. And it's actually the thing that makes it actually feel quite pleasant is that. Okay, I lost that argument. But someone out there gets. Excuse me. It felt good. The message being that it felt good personally, that I'm not just one insane person inside Apple who feels this way, that this is a good product that we need to keep nurturing. There are other people outside of Apple that also have seen the work that we're doing and thinks it's really great and that they want to see it endure. And that is a very, very reassuring thing, a very pleasant thing.
- [70:36]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [70:37]
Leo Laporte
There are other things we've learned from the new beta 2 of the developer release. For instance, it looks like there will be an iPhone 17 that's slim, extra thin.
- [70:50]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. These little things left in the code or left in the resources used to be a bigger deal before. Mark Gurman already knew about them and told us.
- [70:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, did Mark Gurman know about the new ringtone? It's from David Price at Macworld. This is. This is called Reflection, and I guess it's the default. It's pretty nice. You'll be hearing it on Apple TV shows for the next five years.
- [71:20]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly.
- [71:20]
Leo Laporte
That's the good news.
- [71:21]
Andy Ihnatko
Exactly. Keep it fresh.
- [71:26]
Leo Laporte
It's a Marimba Ish.
- [71:28]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [71:28]
Leo Laporte
Yes, yes.
- [71:29]
Andy Ihnatko
Marimba esque.
- [71:30]
Leo Laporte
Marimba esque. Four new camera features according to 9to5Mac coming to the iPhone 17 Pro and upgraded. Now, this is rumor, but we're getting to the point now where these rumors are pretty well founded because they're probably making them. Right? They're starting to make them now.
- [71:49]
Andy Ihnatko
You think?
- [71:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you think an upgraded 48 megapixel telephoto upgrading it. So they introduced 48 megapixels in wide, right. In the 14. And then the ultra wide went to 48. And now they're saying 48 megapixels for the telephoto. You know, for years we said 12 megapixels is enough. Why 48 is that? So we can bin and really still have 12. It is a multiple if you have.
- [72:22]
Jason Snell
Good light, like if you're taking something. So if you say take something that's low light probably doesn't help that much. You have a bin, you can do your own processing to it. So if you capture 48 megapixels, you take it into something like Topaz or something like that, and you might choose with more time and all the other things that you can do, you have more control to clean it up and then take it down to something or leave it at 48 megapixels because there's something like Topaz will take. Topaz AI will take a that 48 megapixels and clean it up a lot, you know, like. And so you end up with that 48 megapixel image. So it's not just bin, it's 48 megapixels in it. But you gave it all this detail, even though there's a lot of grain and schmutz on it and so on and so forth. But the other thing is, is that when you take the 48 megapixel and you've got a lot of light, it's a big picture that looks great, Right. Put it on a billboard, huge photo. And I use it for photogrammetry. So I switch over to 48 megapixel. So when I'm. Okay, I'm going to take, I'm going to build a 3D model from this and I want all the data I can get. And it's, it's really effective at that. And so the, you know and the, you know. So you want more of that.
- [73:24]
Leo Laporte
That's what these small pixels though, because it's still a small sensor. It is.
- [73:27]
Jason Snell
That's why you can't, you can't shoot it in a bar. But if you're outside park. And that's why everyone's using these little screens that we talked about earlier is.
- [73:34]
Leo Laporte
Because mine comes today. Apparently I ordered it.
- [73:36]
Jason Snell
But they want to use that, they want to use that lens to capture their selfies, not the other one. And if you want to crop into it, it's all, all useful. Again, not good in low light, but, and, but not necessarily, but not bad. When it's, when you, when you're out and about, it's, there's a lot of light out there.
- [73:50]
Andy Ihnatko
And by default what Apple's doing is they're taking that 48 megapixel data and they're, they're running it. Sometimes they bin it. They're taking multiple images and doing some processing on it. And what they, I think by default what they end up generating is a 24 megapixel image. So they're finding. Right. Because it, because it's not as huge and they're doing all of that processing in their pipeline to make it be a really, really good image. So they're using those pixels. But it's not one to one unless you're Alex and then you flip over to the full on 48. And I think that's the rationale, right, is they can do more with 48 megapixels than they can do with 24 even or 16 even if what they get out of it is not necessarily a 48 megapixel image.
- [74:42]
Jason Snell
And the thing is that by getting that 48 megapixel, even the low light. I think part of why the low light looks so good is because it's being sourced at 48 megapixels and then they're able to a, do some cleanup before they scale down. And then when they scale down that bicubic mapping of averaging out all those pixels is how you get rid of a lot of the stuff that's there. Because I take stuff at night or dark area, not even night, just dark areas and just can't believe you're out on a street corner and you take a photo of something and it looks so good.
- [75:14]
Alex Lindsay
So much of this stuff is getting where the quality of the phone camera is not necessarily academic, but I'm aware of there are two groups of people that are using good camera phones. One are always going to be just the people who. This is the family camera. I want to push a button and get a picture, absolutely reliability and I want it to be good enough or better than good enough. But I don't have a high ceiling for what I'm expecting. And then there are people like me who are hobbyists, photographers or at least when they're not taking a snapshot at a nephew's birthday party, they're like, oh wow, I happen to be here at the Golden Gate Bridge, like near sunset. This is a really great picture. I'm going to take this picture. And whereas at one point we would have to sort of hope that the camera did a really good job of capturing this image. I mean I use Topaz too and its ability to take a somewhat sketchy image and simply get rid of in a very, very naturalistic way, all of the grain. That was a problem. Correct some of the details that got missing again, in a very, very naturalistic way. And to take even just to go back to pictures I took with a 10 year old phone camera and say, well, actually I didn't like the fact that it was low resolution and super grain. Now I feel as though I've got a DNG file that is good enough that I can actually start working with it. So I'm wondering if we're entering into a phase where the wars of the cameras are going to sort of start to wind down. It's going to be more about, hey, don't spend $1,000 on a brand new camera phone. Spend $200 for a license on this really, really great tool that will take any potato and potato phone camera picture and turn it into something that is essentially like a full frame mirrorless.
- [76:57]
Leo Laporte
This. We don't want to, we don't want to scoop your pick for later on, but there is something Andy will be talking about later in the show.
- [77:06]
Jason Snell
But I will say that, that I think that the, even my, my wife who has a 13 and I have a, a third a 15 when we're out about to shoot, she's like, oh, shoot it with your camera. So people tell that can tell the difference.
- [77:20]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [77:20]
Jason Snell
Of like, oh, even just that jump from the 13 to the 15, you know, she, she'd rather have me take the photo than her take the photo. If she if of the family, you know, if we just. Because she knows that the camera will be better, you know. And I think that's what's happening. I think there's still a lot of room to grow for these cameras. I don't think we're settling in at all. I mean I think that we're. There can be bigger sensors, there can be better calculations, you know, longer lenses, shorter depth of, you know, shorter depth of field that is more effective. The hair detail gets better every single time. These higher res photos make it easier to get that hair detail back out there is. I was kind of disappointed. I don't, I'm not disappointed yet because I don't know what's going to happen. But when you look at the longer, the larger island on the back of the new phones, I'm really hoping for lenses that are almost the interocular distance apart so that those of us who are shooting that stuff can just pick up the phone and shoot an image that is in stereo at a better, you know, that has a little bit more depth to it than the current spatial cameras.
- [78:21]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I just try to be a little bit practical from my own experience that I can be really, really persnickety about quality. And it's just that some of my point of view is shifting a little bit in the past two or three years as I'm realizing that I've gone from, I mean if you go into my Flickr account, which I kind of abandoned, I basically now pay for it just for storage of 10 years worth of photos that I took before Google Photos and Apple Photos came along. But you could see like the camera tests I would take in the 2010s where every time there's a new camera, every time there's a new phone, I would have to. I really felt as though I had to go to the Boston Public Library and take the same suite of photos with five or six different cameras all over again to see which one can finally pull out the detail in that John Singer Sargent mural, which one of them can get a really good picture of a fast moving squirrel and over time realize that all of them are now really, really good. And the next part that got me was realizing that now that everything gets dumped into Google Photos, including the stuff from my really, really nice mirrorless camera with a really, really nice lens on it, it annoys me that if I took a picture that came out pretty good on my phone and then I spent just five minutes in Lightroom Mobile just adjusting the tone curve to where I wanted it, adjusting the color balance to exactly where I wanted, all that sort of stuff. I have to look at the info on the picture to figure out out which one of these was taken with a phone and which was taken with this amazing mirrorless camera that I absolutely adore. So yeah, there'll always be room for improvement in hardware again, particularly with there are wonderful advancements being made in like synthetic digital zooms. But nothing will ever beat. No, you have an actual 10x optical zoom and that's where you start from. Nothing will be ever beat that. But I'm trying to reset my own expectations that, wow, what are people actually using these camera features for? And how important is it to be pixel peeping for myself time and time and time again to see. Well, this is the iPhone 6 17, but let's compare it to the Pixel 10. Let's compare it next to this. Because it's like at some point you can say that, yeah, that looks better, but it's subjective. And also if you don't like it, don't even, even subscribe to the light for mobile. Just tap, edit, go, eek.
- [80:46]
Jason Snell
Yeah. To your point, I think that, I don't think that people, I don't think either Google or Apple have to keep up with each other other than staying in the same lap, you know, they just can't get lapped, you know, like on the phone. Like, you know, they're in the same. If they're somewhere, if they're, they can, they can be, you know, five or six lengths behind. They can, you know, and it goes back and forth or whatever because they both. There's a certain amount of lock in with both hardware pieces, but they just can't get lapped, you know, and I think that they both. And I think it's great for us, I think we're benefiting from that. But I, you know, I have have this wide mixture mostly of my family of pictures that are taken that were taken mostly in the early days. You can tell in the early days were taken with an SLR and then taken with the iPhone has been 90% of the newer stuff. And the SLR stuff is still nicer.
- [81:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's still better.
- [81:32]
Jason Snell
Let's not oversell the camera 100%. But the difference between that SLR and my phone camera is where I think Apple and Google can continue to grow towards. Because someday it will get to a point where the camera on my phone is as good as the SLR camera. But I think we still got maybe five to 10 years before that happens.
- [81:53]
Leo Laporte
You remember when filmic Pro came out and promised the ability to use the front and back camera at the same time. Apparently this is a feature coming to iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. The ability to do multi cam recording not just with the front and back lenses, but also with other camera phones. Yeah. Isn't somebody doing this? I know Filmworks.
- [82:17]
Jason Snell
Yeah, there's a couple companies. I want to say.
- [82:23]
Leo Laporte
It would take the high end hardware. I would imagine there's like an API.
- [82:29]
Andy Ihnatko
To do this, but Apple hasn't done it directly.
- [82:31]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [82:32]
Andy Ihnatko
So that's the difference here is being able to use multiple cameras and have the bandwidth in there. Because it used to be. Yeah, you could do. Because that was the thing you could do like an interview where the back camera was shooting you and the front camera, we were shooting your subject and you could record both of those streams and use them later. So putting that in the system software, feeling comfortable enough to just put it in the camera app.
- [82:54]
Leo Laporte
That's cool.
- [82:54]
Andy Ihnatko
For use for later. Yeah, it's another little thing like that podcasting thing I mentioned earlier. It's a little thing that's a very specific kind of professional media creator use case that it's really nice to do it and to not have a third party app that you have to use in order to do it is cool.
- [83:08]
Leo Laporte
Great. Yeah. Also they're going to improve the selfie camera. A 24 megapixel true depth front camera. That'll be welcome. Right. I mean, that's what a lot of people use that selfie camera more than they use the other camera.
- [83:27]
Jason Snell
Yeah, well, and that's again why the screens that we were talking about are getting popular. I mean, it went from I didn't hear about them to you go to Amazon, do a search for that kind of screen.
- [83:34]
Leo Laporte
They're all over now.
- [83:35]
Jason Snell
There's 20 of them. I'm sure that there was part of. It was probably at ces there was a Chinese company that said, hey, we've got this screen.
- [83:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can have white label. Yeah, Everybody.
- [83:43]
Jason Snell
They're all slightly different. They're little buttons over here, little buttons over there, but it's all the same screen.
- [83:48]
Leo Laporte
So I have to check my, my Amazon delivery guy, see how, how close he is. He took a while, but I think that was because they were, they were like doing it in, in shipments. Right. They. They were, they sold out. Which I believe.
- [84:03]
Jason Snell
Which, which one did you order?
- [84:05]
Leo Laporte
The one you told me to order. What else?
- [84:07]
Jason Snell
I don't remember which one I told. There's like three of them.
- [84:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you said don't get that one. Get this one. And I got this one, not that one.
- [84:13]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think they sold out pretty quickly when I did.
- [84:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think they do it in batches at this point. A lot of people are doing that. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy and Ako, who will have a pick of the week about photography. That's exciting. Jason Snell from Mac World and, And Macworld and six colors, I should say.
- [84:32]
Andy Ihnatko
Excuse me emeritus, for Macworld. That's still right there.
- [84:35]
Leo Laporte
You're still right this week. Yeah. You're in there right now.
- [84:37]
Andy Ihnatko
Sure.
- [84:39]
Leo Laporte
Do they. They don't send out a paper magazine anymore, do they?
- [84:42]
Andy Ihnatko
No, that was actually I. My farewell column that was coded, was a farewell to the print magazine which was going away. And the secret was that it was also a farewell to me because I was also going away. So it's been. Been almost 11 years now that they've been digital only.
- [84:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I still get, you know, I. The Atlantic. I get an Atlantic magazine in the mail. I don't, I don't want it. I recycle it immediately. But it's just kind of. Sometimes when you get these digital subscriptions, they insist you get the paper version.
- [85:13]
Andy Ihnatko
Well, you know why they do that? Because they want to make their number of their guaranteed cirque for that. And so they'll force you. That happened. My local newspaper paper, the Marin Independent Journal, we started getting Sunday paper from them, and it turns out that they had just opted all their digital subscribers into the Sunday paper because they wanted to make their. So I mean, now, now that I've worked in that industry, I, I know, I know why you do stuff like that. And you deliver. I, I once, you know, you, you cancel abc, you cancel a magazine, and they keep giving it to you, and you're like, but I canceled. And the answer is, yep, but we need to make our number because they, they guarantee to an advertiser that they, they're gonna distribute 300,000. Exactly. And if they don't deliver, then the advertisers are gonna ask for their money back. So you end up with these. You're trying to make your cirque. So Macworld is still in. Like, if you're an Apple News plus, it's still in there along with PC World, because it's, it's, it's. They still do a digital magazine, but they don't do paper anymore.
- [86:09]
Leo Laporte
I don't need the paper. I don't. I haven't.
- [86:11]
Andy Ihnatko
It's cool. Every now and then I look in there and I'm like, oh, I wrote a feature story but it's actually, you know, a couple of my columns that they put in and they got some art and they put it a thing in the magazine.
- [86:20]
Leo Laporte
It's DCs doing that with Mad magazine now. It's sad. Poor Dick D. Bartolo doesn't even get paid extra when they rerun his, you know, his work from 50 years ago.
- [86:28]
Andy Ihnatko
I mean Mac World, Macworld and PC World, their digital magazines are basically like curated best of the website which was, I mean that's what we tried to do back when I worked there. It's like not everybody, you know, wants to read about Apple stuff every day. I know it's hard to believe listeners of Mac Break Weekly, but not everybody does. And so what, what you know, Macworld is trying to still do in PC World is, is say, well we've, we've taken the best of the stuff we wrote over the last month and we put it in this nice little bu that you can go and read. And it's not a bad idea. Like, I mean it's kind of like a newsletter almost. I mean you could even argue that the, the right thing to do might even be to do a weekly kind of like it's a matter of how much you care. This is a long standing theory I've got which is the Internet so often magnifies everything to be like, you must be intensely interested in this. Right, right. And so you end up with like a flood of like whatever you're into. Suddenly you've got 15 articles a day about it. And it's very hard in that environment to say, you know, I'm mildly interested in this. I only read it.
- [87:26]
Leo Laporte
I read one article.
- [87:27]
Andy Ihnatko
I'll read a few articles about it once a month or once a week, but I don't want 10 things a day about it. And the Internet, you know, and, and the business of the Internet has pushed everything to be like no, no, no, you must have everything now. And that was the nice thing about things now it's old man time. Like a monthly magazine is like sometimes, I know this is hard to believe. Sometimes you only care about something a little bit.
- [87:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [87:51]
Andy Ihnatko
And the Internet does like is not interested in that. They want you to care about it 100%.
- [87:57]
Leo Laporte
You can't skim the Internet. You can skim a newspaper. You can like, I mean watch how people read newspapers. They don't usually focus in on an.
- [88:05]
Andy Ihnatko
Article but if you're in a special interest area, the special interest area Wants you to be 100% committed to them.
- [88:11]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you're right.
- [88:12]
Andy Ihnatko
Versus like saying, you know, I care about Apple stuff, but I only really want to read up five articles a month about it.
- [88:19]
Leo Laporte
And it's like, sorry we stopped doing daily podcasts. I know that, you know, there's some of the biggest podcasts are daily, like the daily and up first. But when we did daily podcasts, the numbers went way down. People don't want. We had. We did the gizmos every day. People don't want it every day. Once a week. That's plenty.
- [88:38]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. I actually got my first six colors cancellation. We used to do a monthly newsletter that was hand delivered and then when. And we changed that to a weekly newsletter that is for members only. And it's all the stuff we posted that week, essentially. And I decided in this era of substack, I changed it to be if it's a day where we posted a full story, you get a newsletter that day. So it's not necessarily seven days a week or even five days a week, but it's, it's more like it. And I got somebody who said it's too much content. I'm going to cancel. And it's interesting because it's literally the same amount of content they got once a week, but now they're getting it on three days a week and they feel like they're being pummeled. And like, I get it on one level, it's that classic New Yorker problem where people cancel the New Yorker because they feel like they're not reading it enough.
- [89:22]
Leo Laporte
I felt guilty. Yeah.
- [89:24]
Andy Ihnatko
And so. And you can. And that's what we felt with the. Doing the digital magazine and Macworld back in the day is like, we generated enough to do like a 400 page magazine every month on the web. But people don't want that. Right. Like, they want it to be curated and slimmed down and be. And be a smaller thing. You could overwhelm people with that stuff. But that's, that's, that's part of the challenge is if your business model is to pound out those stories and get them out there, you're kind of turning off people who are like, interested but not that interested. It's a real interesting challenge.
- [89:53]
Leo Laporte
I just want to let everybody know you don't have to listen to every one of these shows.
- [89:58]
Andy Ihnatko
That's right.
- [89:58]
Leo Laporte
Listen when you feel like it. Listen for as long as you like. I don't want anybody. I know people cancel subscriptions because they're piling up. That's Fine.
- [90:07]
Andy Ihnatko
It's okay. You can let it go and still be. We still like you. Yeah. So one of my podcasts, the one I've been doing the longest, the Incomparable, it is an eclectic selection of pop culture topics. We do books and movies and TV shows and comics and all sorts of different stuff. And I talk to people about it, and they're like, oh, Jason, I like the Incomparable, but I can't listen to every episode because, like, I don't. I'm not really interested in that kind of TV show or that kind of movie. And I'm like, the only, Literally the only person who cares about every episode of the Incomparable is me, because I'm the host. I don't expect anyone else to do it. And it's. If I were to build that product today as a, as a media professional, I would, I would have to have more focus because it is all over the place. But, like, it's okay. It's like, hey, I'm glad you subscribe.
- [90:53]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [90:54]
Andy Ihnatko
Listen to the episodes that please you and don't listen to the episodes that.
- [90:57]
Leo Laporte
Don'T feel guilty if you don't listen. It's okay.
- [91:00]
Andy Ihnatko
Okay.
- [91:00]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's okay.
- [91:01]
Jason Snell
I think it's funny. I'm very, so. I'm so live oriented that I listen to that. Like, for Twit, I listen to the shows live or I don't like. For me, that's how I listen.
- [91:11]
Andy Ihnatko
We have those.
- [91:12]
Jason Snell
For me, it's just not overwhelming. Like, if on Sunday, Sunday's a day that I'm often organizing my office or whatever, and twit's the perfect thing to turn on, you know, so I can listen to it and everything else. But I, I, I tend, I found myself not listening to that many, as many podcasts. I think Twit is Twit and this American Life are probably the two that I have podcasts that I listen to a lot. 20,000 hertz.
- [91:33]
Leo Laporte
That's pretty good company you've got us in.
- [91:35]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah. So, but that's, but that's about, but other than that, I, it falls off pretty quickly. And then I, I have the same problem. Like, oh, oh, I forgot that that podcast existed. That's my problem is that I, they.
- [91:45]
Leo Laporte
Don'T, they don't bo some effects. I was just talking in the discord about, you know, the number one category of disk storage is podcasts, and they periodically just go through it and download it or delete it, rather, because it, you know, it just takes up so much space.
- [92:01]
Jason Snell
I Think I have the same problem that I had with books, that I have with audiobooks that I have with podcasts, is there's a lot of aspirational listening. You know, like, I aspirationally subscribe to lots of things. Same with YouTube channels. I'm like, oh, that's great. I'll subscribe to that.
- [92:15]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely.
- [92:16]
Alex Lindsay
Nothing provokes a long, long of weekend house cleaning, like realizing how far behind I am on podcasts that I love. It's like, well, six hours. That's enough time to, like, move all the furniture out of the living room, roll up the carpet, wash the floor.
- [92:30]
Leo Laporte
I think I'll paint the house. Yeah. I recently, I don't know if I mentioned on this show I missed an email from Audible that said, we're going to cancel your membership because you have an old membership. We don't want to offer any anymore. And if you respond to this email by May 31st, we'll give you a free year to make up for it. Which I missed the email. It was in my spam bucket. So on June 16, I got an email saying, hey, we've canceled your subscription. Bye. I said, I've been a subscriber for 25 years. Two books a month for 25 years. I have 750 books. And then I thought, you know what? This is a blessing because I haven't listened about how half of them.
- [93:11]
Jason Snell
So now you can work your way through them.
- [93:13]
Leo Laporte
I was just getting two books a month. Two books a month. Make sure you use the credits. And so now I said, fine. Thank you, Audible. You did me a favor. And I've downloaded. Of course, the first thing I did is download them all from Audible's site and take out the DRM so I can listen to them in some other player in case Audible decides with very little warning, that I should no longer be able to listen to them either. And Now I've got 750 books. And you know what? By the time I get to the end of that, it'll be like the Golden Gate Bridge. I'll just start over, end at the the beginning. I'll never know. I'm looking forward to being in the home and just having an audiobook player running all the time. And I won't care what it is. It can ran pick random chapters. I should write that. A random chapter audiobook player. So you don't even know what you're listening to. It's just going, we're going to take a little break. I know you don't know what you're listening to. We're just going and going and going. You're listening to Mac pretty quickly, I'll tell you that. Right. Right now. That's Jason Snell, who does even more podcasts than I do@sixcolors.com Jason Andy Inako, whose website will be out any day now, giving you even more to read. But it will all be beautiful, beautiful prose. And Alex Lindsay, who for some reason decided I should do a show every morning.
- [94:27]
Jason Snell
Covid it made sense when we started.
- [94:30]
Leo Laporte
Every morning I should do a show. But it's. It's live, damn it. It's great to have all three of you. It's great to have you listening to. A reminder, though, one of the things that makes this possible is your club Twit membership. I do hope you're a member. If you're not, I hope you'll consider it. 10 bucks a month, $120 a year. There are corporate and family plans that have a discount. What do you get? Well, first of all, the fuzzy feeling, warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing you're supporting, supporting the programming you presumably like enough to support it. It really does make a difference to us. It is 25% of our operating income. Without the club, we would have to let people go. We would have to cut back on shows. With the club, we can do more. In fact, a lot of what we do is in our club to a Discord. Discord is a place of club members get together. You don't have to do that. But a lot of them, maybe 65, 75% of them, go in the Discord. So it's a great place to hang out. I go in there all the time. I get inspiration, I get ideas, I get brickbats and bouquets. We also do shows in there. In fact, I want to remind you that tomorrow Scott Wilkinson is doing his Q and A special of home theater geeks. 5:15 Pacific, 8, 15 Eastern, right after Intelligent Machines. And he wants questions from the Discord. So get in there. If you're not a club member, join right now. You'll be able to participate. We are doing something very fun on Friday. Friday we're going to talk about music with my old friend Norman Maslov, who runs a YouTube channel about vinyl called Mazzy's Music. He's a vinyl king. But we're also going to talk with the author of a book about MP3s in digital music. So we're going to do it a little bit backwards. So we'll talk digital first, then we'll talk vinyl. We'll go back in time. That's this Friday. We'll start at noon, go through one or two. I hope you'll join us. Our AI users group is July 11th. If you're interested in AI. This is a real hands on thing Anthony Nielsen started and we've had a lot of fun playing with tools. We have the photo workshop coming up with the monthly show we do with Chris Marquardt. Our word of the month is quirky. Take a picture. Join us. We'll talk about some of Chris's picks. Micah's crafting corners Fun. It's just a cozy chill. It's like Bob Ross but you pick the painting, whatever it is Micah's doing. Leg. You could crochet, you could knit. A lot of people cook. It's a lot of fun. That's just some of the things happening in the club. And of course I mentioned it's like a blanket made out of pure love. I did mention that we do our keynotes now. There to keep them out of the evil eyes of Apple attorneys. So all of that for 10 bucks a month. I think that's a good deal. Twit TV Club Twit. Thank you in advance. I appreciate it. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundled your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary vary not available in all states.
- [97:48]
Jason Snell
Imagine you're a business owner relying on a dozen different software programs, each one disconnected. More expensive and more complicated than the last.
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Leo Laporte
It can be incredibly stressful right now. Picture Odoo. Odoo brings all the tools your business needs into one simple CRM, accounting, inventory.
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Jason Snell
Manufacturing, marketing, HR and more.
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Leo Laporte
All seamlessly connected. Everything works together, giving you the peace of mind that your business is running.
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Alex Lindsay
Smoothly from every angle.
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Leo Laporte
Odoo's open source applications are user friendly.
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Jason Snell
And designed to scale with your business.
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Leo Laporte
Saving you time and money. Say goodbye to juggling multiple platforms and hello to efficient integrated management. Stop wasting resources on complicated systems and.
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Jason Snell
Make the switch to Odoo today.
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Alex Lindsay
Visit Odoo o d o o dot.
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Jason Snell
Com and discover how Odoo can simplify.
- [98:42]
Leo Laporte
And streamline your business operations.
- [98:44]
Jason Snell
Odoo Modern Management Made simple hi Zoe Saldana, welcome to T Mobile.
- [98:50]
Leo Laporte
Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.
- [98:52]
Andy Ihnatko
Thanks.
- [98:53]
Jason Snell
And here's my old phone to trade in.
- [98:54]
Leo Laporte
You don't need to trade in when you switch to T Mobile.
- [98:56]
Andy Ihnatko
We'll give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your.
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Jason Snell
Old Phone up to 800 bucks and.
- [99:02]
Leo Laporte
You still get to keep.
- [99:03]
Andy Ihnatko
There's always a trade in.
- [99:04]
Jason Snell
Not right now.
- [99:05]
Leo Laporte
@ T Mobile.
- [99:06]
Andy Ihnatko
I feel like I have to give.
- [99:07]
Jason Snell
You something in return for karma.
- [99:08]
Andy Ihnatko
That's okay. I don't really have much in my purse.
- [99:11]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, let's see.
- [99:12]
Jason Snell
Hand sanitizer.
- [99:13]
Andy Ihnatko
It's lavender.
- [99:13]
Leo Laporte
I'm good. Seriously.
- [99:15]
Andy Ihnatko
Let me check this pocket.
- [99:16]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, mints.
- [99:18]
Leo Laporte
Really, I'm fine.
- [99:19]
Jason Snell
Oh, I have raisins.
- [99:20]
Andy Ihnatko
I'm a mom.
- [99:21]
Leo Laporte
Wait, wait one sec.
- [99:22]
Alex Lindsay
I've got cupcakes in the car.
- [99:23]
Andy Ihnatko
It's our best iPhone offer ever. Switch to T Mobile, get a new.
- [99:27]
Alex Lindsay
Iphone 16 Pro with Apple and intelligence on us.
- [99:29]
Andy Ihnatko
No trade in needed. We'll even pay off your Phone up.
- [99:32]
Leo Laporte
To 800 bucks with 24 monthly bill credits. New line 100 plus a month on experience beyond Finance Agreement 999.99 and qualifying.
- [99:40]
Jason Snell
Hoarded for well qualified plus tax and 10 connection charge.
- [99:42]
Leo Laporte
Payout via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days credits and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel CT mobile.com Let's see. NFC release 15 has been announced. I think this is of interest. Apple folks. Promote Grady's power page. NFC release 15 announces next gen devices will get quadruple the range. That could be interesting. I have an NFC door lock.
- [100:10]
Jason Snell
For instance, the quadruple the range is from 0.5 millimeters.
- [100:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Okay. It's a little farther.
- [100:19]
Jason Snell
That's the jump. So it's.
- [100:21]
Leo Laporte
It's up.
- [100:22]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [100:23]
Leo Laporte
It doesn't say four times. What? Yeah, from half a centimeter to 2 centimeters.
- [100:26]
Jason Snell
Half a centimeter. I'm sorry, not millimeter.
- [100:27]
Leo Laporte
So it's not a millimeter. Half a centimeter to 2 centimeters.
- [100:30]
Jason Snell
Five dimes to 20 dimes. Think of it. So that's the math. So it does mean it's like you don't have to do. Is it at the top of the thing or at the bottom?
- [100:38]
Leo Laporte
It's not so precise. Yeah, that's the problem with my NFC key lock. It often doesn't work because I have to position the phone just right.
- [100:46]
Andy Ihnatko
But you don't want this to be too much. Right. That's the thing is that. Is that the solution here isn't ultimately you can NFC from six feet away because no point is it needs to be extremely proximate to whatever you're doing so that it can't be hijacked. It can't be. Somebody can't brush past you and do something like it's meant to be. This is just like taking it a little bit further than it was where you don't, you don't have to. Yeah, hold it, hold your watch right up to it and bang into it and before it finally gets to do your Apple Pay or whatever.
- [101:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. If you use tap to pay. Hey, you're using nfc so your watch or your phone. So that's good. And I presume Apple is on the board so Apple will probably support this when it comes out.
- [101:26]
Andy Ihnatko
I have an NFC door lock and. And you. Yeah, I'm kind of banging my watch against it to get to unlock the door. It might be nice if, if that was a little more smooth of a. Kind of like wave it in front of the door and. And it opens. Although that. Yeah, all that stuff is getting better too. So it'll, it'll be. Because they're also doing UW in a lot of, a lot of this stuff now. Ultra Wideband and I know it's another three letter acronym but uwb, the advantage there is it knows exactly where you are in three dimensions related to whatever object you're talking to. This is. They use it in Find my. But that allows. Will allow smart door locks to do things like know that you're at the front door and unlock it for you. But if you're standing, if somebody knocks on your door and you're on the inside and you come over to the door, it knows you're behind the door so it doesn't unlock it for that person. Like that's in some cases the UWV stuff is going to be.
- [102:17]
Jason Snell
Yeah, Ultra Wideband has been really underdeveloped since it was announced. Like it doesn't feel like it's widely.
- [102:24]
Leo Laporte
Some of that's because of beacons and people were very paranoid about, you know, privacy and so forth.
- [102:30]
Andy Ihnatko
It's also just a matter of time of rolling out the text. So the phones have had it for a little while. But like the first UWB door locks or you know, for your house are coming out this year. So they are starting to come out but it lags a little bit. And I think though there are now cars that are shipping that have UWB support for, for locks as well. So like it's starting to happen and it's just. I think the issue is first you got to get it in the phones and then you got to get it in all the accessories. But the. I'm excited. Like I will, I will absolutely upgrade to a UWB Door lock at some point in the next couple of years. Because it'll be. Because then rather than having to wait for my watch to be jammed in its face, it will literally know I'm walking toward the front door and unlocking, which is how it should be.
- [103:14]
Jason Snell
I feel like I want something like an air, you know, an Apple tracker or something in everything myself. I think part of my brain is starting to die related to where my, my keys are because I used to. I don't think I lost them nearly as often as I do now because I'm just constantly open up my phone and just going, oh, where's that? Where's that? Where are the keys? Maybe it's just I don't look anymore. I don't bother to look anymore because I know that I'll find them really quickly. But it's, it's a. But I, I find, you know, I put them in every bag that I travel with. Like if I'm, if I'm getting on a. Every bag has an airtag in it. And I'm surprised that the bags don't. They haven't started building ones that you could just snap the air tags into like somewhere hidden in the. Whatever. I can just snap one in because it's, it's. It really takes a lot of the stress out of or adds the stress because there was my last flight, I landed in LA and I could see my, my airtag in Utah.
- [104:07]
Alex Lindsay
And now like so many air. I think another air, I forget which one it was but another airline announced that their, their baggage like debugging process is now going to start supporting airtags as well. But yeah, this is, this is exactly the sort of thing that you look back and you wonder, gee, how come everything, how come so many things got so much better? I don't know what, I don't know how it happened. And it is because like this technology that you don't really interact with directly or think about went to the next level. Same reason why battery chemistry developments in the past 10, 15 years has like, oh, that's why phones don't stink anymore. That's why laptops don't stink anymore. That's why I have a flashlight that I don't have to charge it like every three days anymore. And it's all because of some, some chemist came up with a way of putting more density per cell per, per unit. And you don't, you never had to know that this revolution actually happened.
- [104:59]
Jason Snell
So yeah, I think that there's. I was reading about some technology supposed to Double our battery and be less flammable and the next, you know, three to five years or so.
- [105:08]
Alex Lindsay
So less flammable is a good thing. I would love to be able to charge my bike, like, inside instead of, like, having. I don't have a garage anymore. So I literally, like, I live on the upper floor of a really great old building, but I literally have to go onto the fire escape and put it, like, on the fire escape. Because ain't no, it's. It's a nice bike. It's not like a cheap, like, TEMU sort of thing, but nonetheless, I don't care how good this company is. I'm not putting a big battery pack. My first inside and carrying my first.
- [105:36]
Jason Snell
Drone, my first drones. The batteries all came with a bag. Like, don't only charge them in this fireproof bag. And I was like, I think I'm gonna put it in the bag. And then in my garage, around concrete surrounded, three feet of nothing. You know, like, I kind of built this little. There's like this little area that I charged all those batteries.
- [105:54]
Leo Laporte
You know, I. I stopped buying airtags and I started buying these chipolo trackers. I'm really happy with them. They were kind of just like airtags bags, except they have a little hole in them so it's easier to put on your keychain. And they come in colors and they support Find my. And I was able to, you know, watch for sales. I think I got four of them for like 35 bucks or something. And they work with Find my and I get a notification when I leave my hat behind. They're small enough I could put them in my hat and so forth.
- [106:22]
Alex Lindsay
So you know what I'd love to see? I think that a lot of people are talking about, like, what's the next airtag going to be? The next iteration. I think the greatest feature that Apple could add is that costs about the same or maybe like a dollar or more, but you get it. And there's like an airtag and then there's also just an inner decoy airtag that you put someplace that is like, kind of visible. Or someone who's looking for an airtag to remove it is going to find it, like, on the underside of my bike seat. And then once they find it, they'll stop looking, but they will never find, like, the real airtag that apparently put on my bike. I think that that's. That's someone who comes up with that product. They would get in a lot of.
- [107:01]
Leo Laporte
Ebikes that had built in find My. I remember it was probably a van move or something really expensive, but it.
- [107:08]
Andy Ihnatko
Was a van move.
- [107:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. They went out of business.
- [107:10]
Andy Ihnatko
R.I.P. yeah.
- [107:12]
Leo Laporte
Do you have a van move?
- [107:14]
Andy Ihnatko
No.
- [107:15]
Leo Laporte
I'm so jealous if you do. I always wanted one. It's a Dutch company.
- [107:19]
Andy Ihnatko
They were very pretty. No, there was a. The San Francisco Chronicle. Peter Hartlob did a little story about Dave Fleming, who's one of the Giants broadcasters, and he in the Richmond district and. And rides his bike to and from the ballpark every day, which is pretty awesome. And. And I looked at the picture and I was like, I mean, Peter's story says it's a nice E bike, but I looked at. I looked up what it was and I realized it's not a van move, but it. Because this company's still in business. But I just. I have an E bike and I think Dave's bike costs about 10 times what mine costs.
- [107:49]
Leo Laporte
You can spend a lot. Yeah.
- [107:51]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. You can buy really nice E bike if you want to.
- [107:54]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Yep. Let's see what else. Oh, my God. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey's Apple TV show has been put on hold because of a creative clash. Maybe the hacky sack they were playing got lost. I don't know. I don't know.
- [108:14]
Jason Snell
He's over their father.
- [108:17]
Leo Laporte
I don't know. Cast A crew were sent home mid month after the departure of the showrunner, David Read west the show. Eight of the 10 episodes have already been shot, which is interesting to pause after that. They're talking with Lee Eisenberg, who worked on Lessons in Chemistry. The story is about a heartfelt odd couple love story revolving around the strange and beautiful bond between Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrell. The bond, however, is tested as the pair's combined families attempt to live together on a ranch in Texas.
- [108:55]
Alex Lindsay
Is it possible that they just got so stoned that they forgot where the studio was?
- [109:00]
Leo Laporte
They could get lost on the way.
- [109:02]
Alex Lindsay
Maybe they weren't like, protesting. They just literally weren't there because they couldn't find it.
- [109:08]
Andy Ihnatko
I mean, this is the most tenuous of Apple stories because it's just a television industry story. I think the first season of the new Daredevil Devil show on Disney. Similarly, they shot up most of the episodes and then they didn't. The studio didn't like where it was going and they fired the showrunner and brought in a new showrunner. They reshot a couple episodes or they shot a couple new episodes, inserted a new episode one, and then did a bunch of reshoots for other points in the season. And I haven't watched that show yet and apparently people liked it. Okay, but like clearly trouble parents, they decided to, to break, to break it. And you only do this when you think it could be fixed. And if they've already shot so many episodes, eight episodes, either. Either they think it needs to be fixed or they're hoping that this will go multiple seasons and they just didn't like they didn't want to spend all this money and then have it be broken. So you know, it's not uncommon. And what the story doesn't say is that Tim Cook sent them a memo. Right. This is. Whoever they're working with at Apple said it's not working and this is pretty routine.
- [110:13]
Jason Snell
Well and often it's the showrunner and then they disagree with the director. The director. You know, like there's, there's a bunch of people that are creatives that are involved. It's probably not as heavy handed from Apple as it may seem in the article. It's probably a bunch of creative people in, internally in that project arguing about it.
- [110:29]
Leo Laporte
I haven't seen F1 yet. Has anybody seen it yet? Apparently the very first thing you see is an Apple iPad.
- [110:35]
Alex Lindsay
Ipods. Yeah.
- [110:37]
Leo Laporte
Or I'm sorry, the headphones, the AirPod Maxes. It's one big Apple Apple ad from front to back. I bet it's still good.
- [110:46]
Andy Ihnatko
They spent the money.
- [110:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be good. And xnx1ad too.
- [110:51]
Alex Lindsay
Except for who the bad guy is. That's all. They're the ones who's using the Samsung beds, Right?
- [110:56]
Leo Laporte
Right. Apple did win a big appeal. A $300 million US patent verdict that they had lost. They appealed. The appeals court threw it out. This is with a. A Reuters euphemistically calls it an IP management company. Optus Wireless Technology. Of course. Where's the trial? In Texas. Jury instructions were flawed in the previous trial, so it's not over yet. It is the second time that that nine figure verdict has been overturned. However, Optus says we are highly confident the court will establish fair compensation for the critical Optus patents that enable high speed connectivity for millions of devices in 2020. The jury said Apple owed half a billion dollars for infringing the patents. It got cut back to $300 million.
- [111:52]
Jason Snell
I just feel like there's such a manipulation of the patent laws and I think that there should be some threshold of you have to at least attempt to make 10% of the patents that you own or 20% or whatever that number is. Or, or you can't, you can't enforce them. Like, you just can't. Like, you can't just have ideas and write them down and patent them. Like that's not what it was built for. It was built so that you would have. You would share with everyone what you did and then you, it would protect you to make it for the next X number of years. And it is, this is a complete perversion of the patent law, you know, and, and it just is, you know, just coming up with an idea and locking it down is not. I, I just, you know, I think that that should be. You should have a certain amount of time to actually execute something and it can be seven years or whatever. Have to do something with a certain percentage of your patents. But this is just bs, you know.
- [112:45]
Leo Laporte
Roughly the same award was given in the UK. The UK Court of Appeals in May increased the award to $502 million for a FRAND license with Optus for Apple. So Apple is looking at could be a billion dollar fines for all of this. There is some question whether Optus is. These aren't 4G patents, by the way. There's some question whether Optus demands are franned fair. What is it FRAN stands for fair and reasonable. I think.
- [113:20]
Alex Lindsay
So.
- [113:21]
Leo Laporte
We'll watch with interest. I'm sure Apple's got the checkbook out. Feds wise up and say, hey, maybe you shouldn't use what's at app if you're communicating. They have they. The federal government says the US House of Representatives staff must no longer use WhatsApp and switch to more secure services like Apple messages. Okay. According to the Financial Times, the chief administrative officer of the House of representatives has banned WhatsApp starting at the end of the months.
- [113:58]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's nice to see them. They're trying to make people follow rules in there.
- [114:02]
Leo Laporte
I'm not sure that's the. But I don't know if WhatsApp is more secure, less secure than Apple messages in both cases. WhatsApp uses the signal protocol. Yeah, I'm not sure really what they're saying here, to be honest. This might be a mistake.
- [114:19]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, me neither.
- [114:20]
Leo Laporte
It might be really a shot by the Trump administration at Mark Zuckerberg, who he's not a fan of. Apparently, WhatsApp messages are end to end encrypted by default, said the spokesperson for Meta. The app should remain on the approved list. In fact, you know, Apple messages are end to end encrypted in some cases, but not all. The House recommends Apple Messages and FaceTime. But they also approve Teams Signal and Wickr, which is, as a Apple insider says, Amazon's messaging app that's so secure you've never heard of it. Okay, okay. It's right up there with Chime, chime, chime. What else? Right. To repair is now the law of the, what do you call it? The law of the continent in the eu.
- [115:17]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of, it's also, it's kind of cool. The bigger, the bigger thing that's associated with that is that part of the EU's new laws that just came into effect is that on when you're, when you're selling devices, you have to have kind of like nutrition labels about repairability, about features, about, about, about a whole bunch of different things. And now those are, those are finally becoming into effect. And so I haven't seen it yet, but apparently that's. Apple's now forced to sort of disclose and be, be willing to stand behind certain claims about, like, battery life on devices because they have to now basically make this public information.
- [115:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they have. What we have, we have now eliminated in the United States those Energy Star labels. Apparently those are gone, but EU is starting to do that now for smartphones, which is, I think, a good thing.
- [116:08]
Jason Snell
Read that article correctly, that it said in 2027 it has to have a removable battery.
- [116:14]
Leo Laporte
Yes, the battery. Let's see the scale, let's see the energy battery endurance.
- [116:20]
Jason Snell
Further down it said that it was. That it needed to be that by 2027 it was going to require all phones to have a removable battery. And I'm.
- [116:30]
Leo Laporte
Smartphones and many other devices sold in the EU will have to feature easily removable batteries by 2027.
- [116:36]
Jason Snell
Yeah, right.
- [116:37]
Alex Lindsay
The text that I read, it might have changed since then, but the text I read basically says that no, you can still, you can still have like an iPhone. You just can't like create it so that you have to destroy the phone to get out the battery and stuff. Swap it out.
- [116:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Easily removable by whom? I guess would be the question.
- [116:53]
Alex Lindsay
Right, Meaning that. Yeah, and Apple. Apple has already done a whole bunch of work, particularly in the most recent redesigns where you don't have to disassemble everything to get at the battery. You know, it's not the, it's not the bottom of a stack of things anymore. So, yeah, don't worry about that.
- [117:07]
Jason Snell
That would be kind of a crazy thing. I was like, I think we'll just get EU phones for that one like Apple, just like, we're just going to make something for you guys.
- [117:14]
Alex Lindsay
But I did because moisture and dust resistance, who needs it?
- [117:19]
Jason Snell
One of the things I thought was interesting though as I started, like, how could they do that? And one thing is as you see them getting thinner and with Mag safe, you could theoretically build a phone that had very little battery. Not no battery, but almost no battery that you slid into a larger sled. You can decide how thick you want your, your phone to be, you know, because for many of us, man, I would love to have a thicker phone that had more battery. Like I just. Especially when you start shooting video, if you start shooting like prores on your phone and it's not, doesn't have external power, it's a really short trip.
- [117:49]
Alex Lindsay
About 12 years ago, one of the reasons why, wasn't the reason why I switched from iPhone to Galaxy S3, Galaxy 3S or whatever it was, one of them was that you could just simply pop off the back, swap out just like, you know, John Wick's swipping cartridges and suddenly be good for another three or four hours and that. And boy, was that great. When you're at like a three day conference.
- [118:11]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [118:12]
Leo Laporte
In our Vision Pro 7 segment for today, what do you know?
- [118:19]
Andy Ihnatko
It's time to talk to Vision Pro.
- [118:22]
Leo Laporte
If you've always wanted to take a hot lap with a famous movie star pretending to be a race car driver, you're in luck.
- [118:29]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, baby.
- [118:30]
Jason Snell
First, that's the first time that I got close to feeling sick. Like it was, it wasn't quite there, but it was the first time I was like, whoa, that I can feel that one a lot.
- [118:39]
Leo Laporte
Is Brad Pitt actually driving or is it.
- [118:42]
Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, they trained him.
- [118:43]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [118:43]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [118:44]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah. So there's a Vision Pro on the TV app. It's a hot lap of Brad Pitt somewhere in the Middle east.
- [118:53]
Leo Laporte
It's called F1, the movie. Hot lap.
- [118:55]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And it's just a lot. I mean it really is like just a one camera on the car. You can watch him, you watch the road. And it didn't have any effect on me, but, but it was very entertaining. Like you're, you're on the race car, you're, you know, mounted to the side of the race car as you do a lap on an F1 track. And that was pretty cool.
- [119:18]
Jason Snell
I thought it was cool. I mean, I don't want to say I didn't think it was cool. It was just that, like that. That's a pretty aggressive thing to do with a, with a Camera. And it was.
- [119:27]
Leo Laporte
Do you think it was an Ursa?
- [119:29]
Andy Ihnatko
The nice thing is that the camera was mounted on the. It didn't move on the car. Right. So the world moves around you, but the car and Brad Pitt and all of that stays pretty static. Which, for me, I think that helped. Helped a lot. Yeah.
- [119:42]
Jason Snell
Yeah, go ahead.
- [119:43]
Alex Lindsay
Sorry. I was going to say, I read something that was interesting. I don't know a lot about F1. I know a little bit enough to know that, wow. Even just getting an actual F1 car to move without it locking up and basically saving the engine from you destroying it is an incredible thing. So I'm amazed that any of these actors actually learned how to operate an F1 car. Turns out that as though this is hugely less impressive, the actors were driving F2 Formula 2 cars that were rebodied to look like F1s. But that's still a pretty good. That's still a pretty good thing.
- [120:17]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [120:18]
Leo Laporte
I remember Paul Newman was a pretty accomplished race car driver. There have been movie stars who drive.
- [120:24]
Alex Lindsay
And Grant Pete was really driving those damn things. Yeah.
- [120:27]
Jason Snell
Yeah. And I think that they. I think Brad Pitt, I think I read somewhere, spent months in training, you know, to be able to train, to be able to drive the car.
- [120:37]
Alex Lindsay
Now we're back on F1. There was a story that came out, like, while we were recording about how Apple wallet users are getting push notifications, like advertising F1.
- [120:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I saw that. Gosh, I hope that's not true.
- [120:52]
Alex Lindsay
You think they would have Learned from the YouTube thing? I mean, I haven't.
- [120:56]
Leo Laporte
I haven't.
- [120:57]
Alex Lindsay
I haven't seen it myself. I put in the show notes under show.
- [120:59]
Andy Ihnatko
People I know have gotten it. It's. It's definitely.
- [121:03]
Leo Laporte
So it's in your wallet and it says, buy tickets from Fandango.
- [121:07]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's in your wallet and you get a user code with Apple pay to save.
- [121:11]
Jason Snell
I can't remember the last time I opened it.
- [121:12]
Leo Laporte
Do you have to have a Fandango card in your wallet or.
- [121:16]
Andy Ihnatko
I don't think so. I don't know.
- [121:18]
Alex Lindsay
Just basically dropping a coupon in your wallet.
- [121:21]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [121:22]
Leo Laporte
Wow. I don't see one. I. Interesting. I do see a card for the Petaluma cheese shop. Ooh, a Wensley tale. Okay. I don't know. I'm hoping. And now you can fly around the Haven 1 space station, which is not yet. Yet been built, but it is a proposed commercial enterprise from vast, the first commercial space station in low earth orbit. In order to get people excited about it, they've got a VR fly through. It's also available on Meta, but you can get it on if you want on the Vision Pro. Have you tried that one, guys?
- [122:02]
Jason Snell
I haven't. I think I was looking for it in the content area, but I think it sounds like it's an, it's an app I haven't downloaded of the Haven VAS VR flythrough.
- [122:11]
Leo Laporte
It's just a 3D rendering of what the Haven one will look like, which is still cool.
- [122:16]
Jason Snell
The biggest problem with a lot of the 3D renderings that have happened so far is that they're not done very well. There's an enormous amount of texturing and everything else that can be done for the Vision Pro and for Meta. And especially if they built it for both the Vision Pro and the Quest, the quality of the textures and everything else will be much lower than what they could be. So it'd be interesting to see how if they pushed, push that up just from a pure processing perspective of how many polygons and how, how big the texture maps can be. But I think that overall, I think that that's. Yeah, I think we've only seen a handful of places where people are actually pushing the quality to what the headset is capable of actually doing. So I haven't taken a look at it yet, but I, you know, and the problem is that people keep on, well, it's good enough for right now or we're just going to see if people like it or not. But that's like, you know, half baked bread is still dough. And so you keep on. Like, if you get halfway there, you're still, you're like, oh, hand out, hand out dough. And they're like, well, they don't like the dough. And they're like, well, it's not finished yet. And I think Apple, half of Apple's business plan is just finishing the bread. Like it's, you know, it's just, it's just like, oh, everybody put out all this dough that's half baked. And let me, let's just, let's just put it in the oven for another 20 minutes and see how it turns out. And, and, and I think that that is, but I think that's what is missing right now with a lot of the 3D stuff that I've seen is that there's just a lot of half baked bread. You know, like they're, they want to test the waters, but they're not testing the waters with something you can actually eat. You know, and so it'll be interesting I'll take a look at. I mean, I'm not saying about this, but my general experience.
- [123:45]
Andy Ihnatko
You're feeding ducks when you test the waters with the bread.
- [123:48]
Jason Snell
Yeah, Yeah.
- [123:49]
Andy Ihnatko
I think I'm trying to get. I'm trying to bring it together, Alex. I'm trying to get.
- [123:52]
Jason Snell
So many metaphors.
- [123:52]
Andy Ihnatko
Trying to get the metaphors together. I had a little Vision Pro item, which is just that, that they released the final recorded version of sandwich video. Released the final recorded version.
- [124:04]
Leo Laporte
Speaking of half baked bread. Yes.
- [124:05]
Andy Ihnatko
Of. Of the talk show.
- [124:07]
Alex Lindsay
Oh.
- [124:08]
Andy Ihnatko
Which they Captured in. In 3D. Not immersive, but in 3D for their theater app. And they released that, and I got to use it. And what's fun about it is they did three different. So the. The grand argument that we all have is, what's the ideal way to record a live event? Event? Is it a single camera in a single position, or is it like what Apple does with a lot of these? You're cutting every four seconds and you kind of, in my opinion, become a moored. And I feel like there's probably a happy medium in there somewhere. But it's not either of those. Anyway, what they did this time is they framed it really brilliantly because you're in their virtual theater. But it looks very much like the theater. It's on a screen, but the way it's lit and the way it's framed, it's like they're on the stage in front of front of you, and it's just people sitting at couches talking. Right. But it is. It's 3D. It looks really good. It's really well shot. And then they did. They also shot it from the left and the right. And if you swipe left or right, it moves you to that part of their theater. And that camera, that's cool. And so then you're at this different angle, and it keeps the illusion that you're kind of looking at a stage. And you can watch sort of over Jon Gruber's shoulder or over Neely Patel shoulder, or you can watch it straight on. And so again, just an experiment. They're recording a podcast on a stage. But last year there were a lot of technical glitches, and this year it looks rock solid. And I really love that they're experimenting with the idea of doing multicam. So you can choose a perspective and just switch between those perspectives. And there's a little bit of a. When you swipe, it sort of goes black, and then it comes up in the other location. It's not instantaneous. But like, it's just a cool way that they're exploring what this sort of thing could do for an event like that.
- [125:59]
Leo Laporte
Excellent.
- [126:00]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. So cool to see.
- [126:01]
Jason Snell
That's great.
- [126:02]
Leo Laporte
And that's your Vision Pro segment.
- [126:04]
Jason Snell
Now you see, now you know, we're done talking. The Vision Pro.
- [126:10]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. Those of you who are waiting for the Vision Pro segment are now free to leave.
- [126:15]
Leo Laporte
But don't leave right away because our picks of the week are coming up next. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Jason Snell and and Alex Lindsay.
- [126:25]
Andy Ihnatko
25 years ago, a small group of.
- [126:27]
Leo Laporte
Business and government leaders met in Washington.
- [126:29]
Andy Ihnatko
D.C. they envisioned the creation of an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years, it's worked with a global community of IT and cyber cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against.
- [126:57]
Leo Laporte
Common cyber threats and streamline compliance with.
- [127:00]
Andy Ihnatko
Industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org that's the letters cisecurity.org to.
- [127:20]
Leo Laporte
Find out how CIS can help your.
- [127:22]
Andy Ihnatko
Organization as we create confidence in the connected world. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
- [127:27]
Jason Snell
Now I was looking for fun ways.
- [127:29]
Andy Ihnatko
To tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway.
- [127:58]
Leo Laporte
Now through July 15th. Stock up on all your favorite personal care brands and earn four times points to use on later purchases. For discounts on groceries or gas. Shop in store or online for items like Pantene Shampoo, Old Spice, Total Bottle Body Deodorant, Tampax Pearl Venus Razors, Head and Shoulder Shampoo, Olay Body Wash and Pantene Conditioner and earn four times points. Hurry before these deals are gone. Offer ends July 15th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Let's kick off the picks of the week. We've been very good keeping mum about Andy's picks. So now, Andy, go for it.
- [128:34]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, this is a really, really great thing. So the computational photography brain trust, formerly on the Pixel team at Google, moved over to Adobe, chiefly Mark Lavoie, who.
- [128:48]
Leo Laporte
Was so impressive at Google.
- [128:50]
Alex Lindsay
Amazing. And before that, like, the first computational photography app that I ever used was an app called Synthcam that was available for iOS when he was a researcher and a professor at Stanford, I think. And I still have like in deep, deep, deep. My camera roll like, oh my God, look, it's in Boston Public Garden. And you can see like there's blurry stuff. The George Washington statue, but the George Washington statue is completely sharp. So they released a technology preview from Adobe. It's a new camera app that's called Project Indigo. And my goodness, it is the stuff from start to finish. There's a long, long, not so technical paper that they published, basically announcing it that really outlines the philosophy and the thinking and the research that goes behind it. Where the idea is to create something that's more of an SLR sort of look to. It's to computational photography. Like, whereas the traditional camera app tends to over denoise things, over saturate colors, over sharpen things, just over process things to begin with, this one uses the very, very latest technology and the very, very latest AI to combine not just a handful of intermediate frames to denoise, but like 30 frames to denoise at the very, very top. It does everything very, very thoughtfully. It again tries to be more like. And I think they say this explicitly in the doc. It's more like we're building a conventional mirrorless camera. But imagine that this mirrorless camera has computational AI and computational photography features built into it. I've been shooting with it for the past week. This is one of the reasons why, yes, it's nice that I have the. It's nice that I have the excuse of. Here's the. I've got the new Developer Beta 1 to test out, but I've been carrying my iPhone alongside my Pixel because I just want to keep playing with this, with this camera app. And I will say taking the same pictures with the stock iPhone app and this app, it's still experimental. It's not as though it's hands down kicks the butt of the stock iPhone camera, but the times, there's many, many times where you can see where the iPhone just got things wrong. The color was kind, it was just not right. The sky is just. Yeah, it's a it's a nice sunny day, but the sky was not that, like, incredibly intense blue. Everything when the different. When there are noticeable differences, this camera is a lot more naturalized, a lot more natural than the iPhone camera. And on top of all of that, I don't think I've seen an attempt to make you get the interface is still, hey, press a button, take a picture, and if that's all you want to do, that's all you have to do. But I've never seen an advanced camera app that tries to introduce pro photography modes and done it in such a simple, elegant way where if you want to give it some extra instruction about saying, hey, I want you to boost up the shadows a little bit, or I want to have some awareness of what the histogram is like, or I want to see where highlights are being clipped out. It is so easy to do all of that stuff without feeling as though the interface is just so damn cluttered that you just want some relief from all of the overstimulation from the ui. It is really, I think one of the simplest things I can say about how much I'm enjoying it is that it has basically taken the place of the camera app in the launcher of my iPhone. Now it's the Project Indigo app is in the space where I would normally go to to tap on the camera button. Now, there are some things to know about this is an experimental app, which means it hasn't crashed or messed anything up as far. Sorry, I've been using it for the past week or so. However, it is super computationally insane.
- [132:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Did you notice your phone gets really hot when you're using it?
- [133:02]
Alex Lindsay
I get. It's the only camera app I've used that without taking like 8K video. It says, hey, the camera is overheating, please, immediately. And that'll. And that. Well, on mine, it'll happen like, this is an iPhone 14 Pro. The doc actually says that we kind of recommend the iPhone 15 because it has more computation.
- [133:19]
Leo Laporte
I have the latest iPhone Pro max and it said almost immediately, oh, your camera's too hot.
- [133:25]
Alex Lindsay
But and the other thing you'll notice is that like as you're taking, when you take the picture, it's one. It's completely responsive. But however, you'll see in the upper, lower left hand corner, the little preview there might be a little countdown timer says it's taking us like four seconds to do the computation and actually write this. And during that time, because as we discussed before talking about the iPad, iOS doesn't do anything in the background. If you by nature then sleep the phone and put it back in your pocket, it might still have some stuff to do by the time you get there. But it's amazing. It has some Labs features. Like, some things is stealing from, like, other Adobe RAW products. Like, if you tap on the Labs button, say, hi, can you just automatically. I took a picture of this thing through a window. Could you remove the reflections, like, automatically? Sure, I can do that. No problem. If you've got Adobe Lightroom, it integrates really, really nicely with Adobe Lightroom, sending its DNG and its RAW data to the app.
- [134:22]
Leo Laporte
I felt like you had to subscribe to the iPhone Lightroom to use it. You don't have to pay anything to use it. You have to have an Adobe account.
- [134:30]
Alex Lindsay
For now, it's 100% free. It's through the App Store. The only thing is that again, in the doc, they say that, yeah, maybe we're not going to keep this free forever, but this is an experimental thing that we want to do. But Adobe, they're saying that Adobe really is very, very much, culturally invested in the idea of not. Not having the camera and the processing and the editing all as part of one app. One part.
- [134:54]
Leo Laporte
The idea is it replaces the Lightroom camera. In fact, there's a switch to do that. Oh, also, and I know you don't have the camera button on your iPhone, but it does work. You can't assign the camera button to it. So, you know, you can actually press the camera button. And.
- [135:11]
Alex Lindsay
I've only, like. I haven't even tried, like, long exposures and like, real nighttime mode with it.
- [135:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [135:17]
Alex Lindsay
Again, the paper that was published with it is not really a technical, technical, technical paper, but it will impress you as to how much work went into this and how much thought went into this and how ambitious this could. Could be in the future. And hopefully one of the new features coming up is an Android version, because for now it's iOS only.
- [135:33]
Leo Laporte
Well, because Mark Lavoie, I think that was the thing that really got me. He was the wizard of computational photography. And Google hired him and Adobe hired him away from Google.
- [135:44]
Alex Lindsay
I've heard him speak multiple times in person about his work. I had one conversation with him at a Google event that like, oh, my God. I was like, I was fan. If it's possible to fanboy with a computational photography, like, researcher, engineer, I did exactly that thing.
- [136:01]
Leo Laporte
But have you played with it, Alex?
- [136:04]
Jason Snell
I just opened it up and started playing with it. Okay, so I don't have a lot of opinions yet. I had it. No, I had it yesterday. I think it came up in.
- [136:10]
Leo Laporte
I took it to the county fair hoping for an opportunity but the phone kept complaining it was too hot.
- [136:15]
Alex Lindsay
So I haven't had that much problems. But yeah, I definitely have been seeing that.
- [136:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I always keep it in a pocket. So, you know, maybe you want to, I don't know, wave it around while you're in between shots or something. Yeah, it's doing that. I mean what that tells you is it's doing a lot of work. It's doing a lot of work.
- [136:34]
Jason Snell
It's using all the phone.
- [136:35]
Leo Laporte
Using all the phone. Alex, Lindsay, your pick of the week.
- [136:38]
Jason Snell
So. So I was fortunate enough to see F1 last week.
- [136:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you did see it?
- [136:44]
Jason Snell
I did, yeah. So I saw it at Skywalker Sound and.
- [136:47]
Leo Laporte
Oh, nice.
- [136:49]
Jason Snell
So I admit I may be a little, a little bit heavy handed given that I saw it in probably one of the nicest theaters in the world.
- [136:55]
Leo Laporte
Certainly the best sounding theater when, when.
- [136:57]
Jason Snell
The, in some cases when the cars flew over. You can feel it in the, in your feet.
- [137:02]
Leo Laporte
It's just.
- [137:03]
Jason Snell
And, and so it is an incredible place to see one. But I will say it's an incredible movie. I'm probably going to go back and see it on. I want to go see it and want to see what the big theaters do. Do with this. So for me seeing it in Dolby, you know, in a Dolby theater and also I really want to see it in IMAX theater because the bass is so heavy but the surround is so good. You know. It is incredible, an incredible movie.
- [137:29]
Leo Laporte
And have you ever seen an F1 race in person?
- [137:31]
Jason Snell
No, I've not.
- [137:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is very, very. The TV doesn't reproduce the sound at all. So I would actually be very curious to hear what it sounds like at the theater.
- [137:41]
Jason Snell
And the reason I wanted to recommend it is that I don't know how well this is going to translate to a smaller screen like it is. There are so many shots that are big screen. And it's interesting that Apple went down this path of something that we know is going to come out. You know, we're all going to get as part of Apple TV plus or whatever. But if you get the opportunity to see it in a big like at an imax, I would highly recommend taking the advantage of it because it's. Wow. It was, I was, I was truly. I, you know, I went, you know, I was, I was interested in the movie. Apple's pushing it so hard. Now I understand why. Like, like it's a It's a really good movie.
- [138:18]
Alex Lindsay
You know, since he says that, that's impressive.
- [138:20]
Leo Laporte
Good. Can't wait to see it.
- [138:22]
Jason Snell
Here's the other thing about the visual effects is that they were seamless. Like, you just. You know, there's so much that they did physically because they were. You know, they were shooting this at the. At the races, you know, And I think that they even had, like, a pod, you know, on the track and so on and so forth for some of the shooting. And so they had a lot of. A lot of this was very physically done. But even with the digital effects, it just doesn't feel. It's not one of those ones where the physics isn't right or the textures aren't right. Right. Or the, you know, everything just kind of seamlessly, you know, comes together and it's a. It was. And again, as a. From a pure sound and visual perspective. And. And I. And I will say I'll be interested to see what people think. I'm. Again, I'm. Even though I got a little bit of tight on that last VR thing, I'm pretty heavy. You know, I don't. It doesn't bother me to see a lot of big screen movement, but there's a lot of it. I mean, they put that those cameras are on those cars, and you really feel like the. The energy that you would have. I don't know what the energy be like. I've been in Indy. We've done some stuff at IndyCars. I've never been in it.
- [139:19]
Leo Laporte
It's probably very similar. Yeah, we went to the Vegas F1 last year, and, yeah, it's a great experience.
- [139:24]
Jason Snell
Sonoma raceway is, like, five minutes from my house.
- [139:28]
Leo Laporte
There's something about F1, though. Those cars are powerful.
- [139:32]
Jason Snell
I think it'll be really interesting. I can see how this is Apple's big experiment in this area, is that I really didn't have a lot of interest in F1. And then I saw the movie, and I was like, oh, I really want to see the next F1. Because you feel like, you know, it. Like there's some drama and you feel like there's all these. You understand it. It's like when you understand it better about what's happening or what it takes to do it, then you're more interested in actually seeing it. And so I can understand where. Where Apple is coming from there. So it'll be interesting to see if other people feel that way. But it is. I would recommend. If you can see it in a theater. See it in the theater. I Don't say that very often. I see maybe, you know, three or four. I used to see a movie every week, and now I see a movie, you know, every quarter maybe. And this is definitely. If I was going to. If I had to choose over the summer season, this is definitely one of the ones that I would think about.
- [140:18]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. Now I really want to see it.
- [140:20]
Andy Ihnatko
Me too.
- [140:21]
Leo Laporte
I'm sad that my connection to Lucas Sound is no longer a Lucas. I would have loved to have seen it in that theater. An amazing theater. Jason Snell pick of the week.
- [140:31]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [140:31]
Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to cheat and just pick a feature that's in Mac OS 26 in beta, which is shortcuts that use AI. I did this today and yesterday. The idea that you can build a shortcut. In my case, I wanted to build a shortcut as part of my blogging workflow that will generate an alt text description of the image that I'm uploading. I already have an automatic uploader and resizer and all of that, but the alt text space is blank. And I thought, well, this would be easy and interesting. And so you can use private cloud compute, which will accept an image input. It is funny dealing with AI, right? Because AI doesn't follow your instructions. It's like a kind of a questionable assistant. It'll do stuff for you, but not maybe. Exactly. So I'm like, don't use double quotes. Have it be only one sentence. And then it gives me responses back that are like four sentences with double quotes. I'm like, what are you even doing? But, you know, it's shortcuts. And so I actually ended up with a prompt that works perfectly pretty well. And then when it's done with that prompt, it counts how many characters are in the response. I changed it from a sentence to just, like, make it 300 characters or less, something like that. And then if it's too many characters, it actually submits that caption again and says, here's. Here's some alt text I got. Can you make this shorter under this number? And then at that point, it actually does a pretty good job. But you. You, like, have to. You got a double. Double bag it. You got to double filter it. And then at the end, there's a step where it takes double quotes and makes them single quotes, because you can tell it not to use double quotes because that'll break the alt tag, but it still will sometimes. So you got to protect against that. And it really gave me a sense of, like, the power and also the just bizarre nature of AI that like it can look at an image and generate alt text in. It's incredible. And for screenshots, I specifically, specifically say like, if it's got a screenshot, include the text of the screenshot. That's going to be very helpful, thank you very much. And it does it, it's really amazing. And then from run to run, it just behaves bizarrely. And that is not because it's Apple's model, it's because it's an LLM and it does that. But what I love about it is my automation to upload images to my website now has alt text baked into it. And you know what? It's good. It's really good. And I couldn't do it before and I know you could have done this with third party stuff before, but the beauty of this for me is that this is just going to be stock on people's devices this fall. And like, I know Alex is out there and Alex is an LLM and image generation astronaut. Like, and I know I have other friends who are like that where they're like, oh, you could have wired this up to the command line and done this and all that. That's all true. But there is something that is next level about saying, here is a shortcut that you can run on any device that is running 26 when it comes out and it does all these AI things and you didn't have to install anything or register for anything. It just does it.
- [143:44]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I think it's gonna be amazing. I think, I think you're right that the, the utility, utility AI that just does these little things and you can use natural language to create it is going to be like for a lot of people.
- [143:54]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just the fact that you could pop any kind of request into a shortcut, like this is not the only way to do user automation. It's just a one little aspect of it. But there are so many things that those of us who've been doing Apple scripts or shell scripts or Python scripts or shortcuts for a while where there are moments that are just kind of like not able to be done because it requires something that we can't program. And to have the ability to just hand an image to an oracle and say, describe this for me and let it sit in the middle of an existing workflow that you built, which is what I did here. It's like I've got a whole thing that it, like it resizes and optimizes my images for the right size. It Builds the HTML code, it puts it on the clipboard or inserts it into bbe. Like all of that is there. All I did is insert one one step where it goes, run the alt text shortcut. And now I've got alt text in all of my image tags that will describe it for people. It's pretty awesome. So I'm very excited. I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's coming in 26, having used the betas for a couple of weeks now. But this one just is the one that blew me away where I had that moment where I'm like, oh my God, I have stuff that I can fix with AI. And. And again, I could have done it before, but it would have been, well, install this and run this and all that. And I love that. This I can literally pass to a friend who's running 26 and say, Run it. And that's it. That's all. Because it's stock and. And it's really great to be on the cutting edge, but there is so much power in having features that are part of the stock build of an operating system, because a lot of people are just never going to install whatever or pay extra for whatever, and we can can all do that. But, like, this is just there for anybody. That's pretty awesome.
- [145:46]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [145:47]
Andy Ihnatko
So shortcuts.
- [145:48]
Leo Laporte
I'm looking forward to it. Can't wait.
- [145:50]
Andy Ihnatko
In 26.
- [145:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's it for the show. On that note, no AI in our show, though, I'm proud to say, in fact, as AI continues to flood our lives. And of course, we do a show about AI called Intelligent Machines, because I think it is really, really interesting. It's nice to know there's a place you can go where there's just humans sitting around talking. And that's what we do right here. If you're into the Apple Macintosh ecosystem, or the iPhone ecosystem, or the iPad, or the Apple TV or the Apple Watch, this is the place. Every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch live if you're in the club on the Discord. But there's also YouTube for everybody. Everybody open to all Twitch, TikTok, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and Kik. Watch where you like, chat with us in all of those places. We can see your chats and we welcome them. But of course, even if it's going to build up and you're going to have guilt, you should still subscribe to the podcast. Just because I don't think we monetize the Patrick, do we Monetize the live viewers. I don't think we're able to and it's only a small fraction of the audience. So download the show. If you would go to your favorite podcast player and if you really, really want to help us, leave us a five star review, help spread the word. You can also get it from our website, Twitter, TV, MBW, that counts. Or watch on YouTube. There's a YouTube video feed and that's a good way to share clips of the show and so forth. However you get it. I hope you will. I hope you'll join us every Tuesday for Mac Break Weekly. Andy inoCCO is@ihnatako.com soon to be open to the public.
- [147:34]
Alex Lindsay
Yep. DNS drops in a few days.
- [147:36]
Leo Laporte
I think in a few days the.
- [147:37]
Alex Lindsay
DNS, unless there's something I don't know about, there's the DNS switchover.
- [147:41]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Exciting. Well, by the next week we'll have something to talk about hopefully.
- [147:45]
Alex Lindsay
Again, I have to backfill a few things, but this within. Anyway, step by step by step, we're very, very close. It's slouching. Very close to Bethlehem at this point.
- [147:57]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Well, great to have you, Andy. Thank you so much. Stay cool. On a very, very, very hot day in most of America, Alex Lindsay is at officehours Global answering questions every morning and anything particular you want to plug.
- [148:13]
Jason Snell
We did a concert on Saturday. I'm not going to lie.
- [148:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah? How'd that go?
- [148:17]
Jason Snell
It went well.
- [148:17]
Leo Laporte
That was with your daughter.
- [148:18]
Jason Snell
My daughter's band, Joystick Failure is what a good name.
- [148:24]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God, that's a good name.
- [148:25]
Jason Snell
And so they played at a studio, Airship Laboratories over in Richmond. And so it's not really a concert. It's more of. You get to listen to them record. Right. Because they played the song a couple times and they play another song a couple times and they, you get to just kind of watch them live, kind of figuring stuff out. And it's the first time we had gone over there without and so is.
- [148:48]
Leo Laporte
That your daughter in the front?
- [148:50]
Jason Snell
No, that's, that's, that's the, that's lead singer's story.
- [148:53]
Andy Ihnatko
Story.
- [148:54]
Leo Laporte
Where's your. Oh, there she is. I see her in the.
- [148:56]
Jason Snell
If you scan for. You'll probably see her because she'll be over. She's probably just out of frame at the moment. She was, I think she was working on an amp at the moment. This is in between songs but if you there, you can see my daughter there with the guitar there.
- [149:06]
Leo Laporte
So that's very nice. Oh Isn't this exciting? So it was, oh man, there she is.
- [149:12]
Jason Snell
And we were testing, you know, a lot of it was just the first time we had gone in there. We were, it's kind of we're going to put up some stuff that's cleaned up and everything else in the next little bit of time. But it's very talented band.
- [149:22]
Leo Laporte
So are they all high school kids?
- [149:25]
Jason Snell
They're all high school. There's some of the. One of the reasons we wanted to capture it was because about half of them are graduating. So this is the last time this band in this configuration. So my daughter and Story are still in the band, but I think everybody else is graduating. So. So they'll have. It'll still be the band, but it'll be a different band next year. So anyway, it's fun.
- [149:44]
Leo Laporte
How fun is that? That's so awesome.
- [149:46]
Jason Snell
Yeah. So we'll leave this raw one up until the end of the week and then we're going to take it down and put up the actual songs that we ended up saving.
- [149:52]
Leo Laporte
It's on the, it's on office hours.
- [149:55]
Jason Snell
It's on our website, on our YouTube channel.
- [149:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very nice. OfficeHours Global is the website. YouTube.com OfficeHoursGlobal is the YouTube channel. There's lots of video, lots of information everyday, constant barrage, a stream of everything you'd ever want to know about everything in the world. Thank you, Alex. Jason Snell is@sixcolors.com sixcolors.com for his podcasts. Anything particular you'd like to mention?
- [150:31]
Andy Ihnatko
Monday's episode of Upgrade with Mike Hurley on Relay fm. We dove deep into discussions about what Apple should or shouldn't acquire, including perplexity, but also way beyond that. We both made some sort of wild suggestions about things that Apple should actually consider acquiring. So if you'd like to hear us spend Apple's money, the upgrade program is there for you.
- [150:59]
Leo Laporte
Very nice, very nice. 6colors.com thank you everybody for joining us. We will see you next time. And as it been my long and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye. Get your tech news exactly how you want it with TWiT TV. Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent delivers quick hit coverage at exclusive journalist interviews, giving you the inside scoop on breaking tech stories in under an hour. Now for deeper dives, I hope you'll join me, Leo Laporte and a great panel of tech industry experts. That's every Sunday with this Week in Tech. We'll break down everything From AI breakthroughs to privacy concern concerns to cybersecurity alerts in the tech world's longest running and most trusted tech news roundtable. So efficient or in depth, the choice is yours. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts and head on over to our website, Twit TV for even more independent tech journalism.
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Jason Snell
Hi, Zoe Saldana.
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Leo Laporte
Welcome to T Mobile. Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.
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Andy Ihnatko
Thanks.
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Jason Snell
And here's my old phone to trade in. You don't need a trade in.
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Leo Laporte
When you switch to T Mobile, we'll.
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Andy Ihnatko
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Leo Laporte
Up to 800 bucks and you still.
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Get to keep it. There's always a trade in.
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Jason Snell
Not right now.
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Leo Laporte
@ T Mobile.
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Andy Ihnatko
I feel like I have to give.
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Jason Snell
You something in return for karma.
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Andy Ihnatko
That's okay. I don't really have much in my purse.
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Alex Lindsay
Oh, let's see.
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Jason Snell
Hand sanitizer.
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Andy Ihnatko
It's lavender.
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Leo Laporte
I'm good. Seriously.
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Andy Ihnatko
Let me check this pocket.
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Alex Lindsay
Oh, mints.
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Leo Laporte
Really, I'm fine.
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Jason Snell
Oh, I have raisins.
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Andy Ihnatko
I'm a mom.
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Leo Laporte
Wait, wait one sec.
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Alex Lindsay
I've got cupcakes in the car.
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Andy Ihnatko
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Leo Laporte
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Alex Lindsay
With Apple intelligence on us, no trade in needed.
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Alex Lindsay
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Leo Laporte
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Leo Laporte
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Alex Lindsay
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Leo Laporte
Com.