MacBreak Weekly 980: I Have Never Ate Tomato Ketchup Onions

Summary

Podcast Summary: MacBreak Weekly 980 – "I Have Never Ate Tomato Ketchup Onions"

Release Date: July 8, 2025

Host: Leo Laporte

Introduction

In episode 980 of MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte welcomes tech enthusiasts Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell to discuss the latest developments in Apple’s ecosystem, including supply chain challenges, software advancements, and innovative product rumors. The conversation also delves into broader tech industry trends and cultural happenings.

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1. Apple’s Supply Chain and Tariffs

Apple is currently navigating a complex geopolitical landscape, caught between pressures from the U.S. administration to diversify its manufacturing and retaliatory actions from China.

• Pressure from the U.S. Administration: The Trump administration has been vocal, with trade advisor Alex Navarro criticizing Tim Cook for not moving production out of China swiftly enough. Andy Ihnatko expresses frustration, stating, “Navarro is an idiot” (17:23), highlighting the unrealistic expectations of shifting Apple’s manufacturing base within a decade.

• China’s Response: In a strategic move, China reportedly pulled 300 Foxconn employees from India, signaling its control over manufacturing operations. Andy explains, “They probably pulled all the operational people” (15:02), making it harder for Apple to establish robust production outside China.

• Impact of Tariffs: New tariffs are set to increase the cost of Apple products manufactured in Thailand by 36% starting August 1st. Jason Snell notes, “They have to bring the Watch and the Max back to the US from Thailand” (21:32), underscoring the financial strain on Apple’s product pricing strategy.

• Apple’s Challenges: Building new factories in the U.S. is time-consuming and expensive. Andy suggests, “It’s going to take years, years, years” (21:37), emphasizing that even with significant investment, production cannot be relocated swiftly enough to meet political demands.

• Potential Strategies: Apple could announce new manufacturing facilities to appease stakeholders, but the practicality is questionable. Leo Laporte muses, “Why don’t they use AI to do it?” (26:00), hinting at innovative yet unrealized solutions.

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2. Apple’s Software Updates and Betas

The team discusses the latest updates in Apple’s software ecosystem, focusing on iOS 26 Beta 3 and TVOS Beta 3.

• iOS 26 Beta 3: Apple is refining its Liquid Glass design, dialing back its liquidity to a more frosted glass appearance. Alex Lindsay appreciates the subtler changes, noting, “It looks like they have some chromatic dispersion” (05:27), indicating a commitment to both aesthetics and performance.

• Release Timeline: Jason Snell anticipates a public beta release, predicting it to follow the developer beta after ensuring stability. “Developer beta is your sense of danger and public beta. They wanted to be like, we spent a week and nobody died, so now it’ll be the public beta” (07:16).

• TVOS Beta 3: With TVOS Beta 3 now available, the entire Apple software suite for iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and TVOS is progressing cohesively. Jason remarks, “It is the most drama-free, stable environment I’ve seen for a while in terms of these summer betas” (09:26).

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3. Apple’s Vision Pro and AI Developments

Apple’s foray into augmented reality and artificial intelligence is a focal point of the discussion.

• Vision Pro Updates: The Vision Pro headset has seen significant advancements, particularly in avatar realism. Jason Snell praises the improved avatars, stating, “It’s just night and day” (86:34). This improvement is attributed to Apple’s acquisition of the 3D avatar company True Meeting.

• Developers' Challenges: Despite its potential, the Vision Pro faces barriers due to limited app support. Jason compares it to the early days of personal computers, expressing a need for more engaging applications to justify the headset’s existence.

• AI Model Advancements: Apple introduced Diffucoder, an AI model that leverages diffusion techniques for more efficient code generation. Alex Lindsay acknowledges the complexity, saying, “I was struggling to understand exactly all the technical stuff about this” (44:27). However, the departure of key AI personnel to Meta raises concerns about Apple’s ability to maintain its AI development momentum.

• Talent Retention Issues: The exodus of Apple’s Foundation Models team leader to Meta illustrates the challenges Apple faces in retaining top AI talent. Jason Snell criticizes the situation, stating, “If Apple ends up being a company that builds really good, efficient models that run on its devices… that's okay” (51:20), but acknowledges the ongoing talent drain.

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4. iPhone 17 and Upcoming Apple Products

Rumors about the iPhone 17 ideate several intriguing features and design changes.

• Design Innovations: The iPhone 17 is rumored to introduce new colors like sky blue and may feature a slimmer design with a more aggressive camera bump. Alex Lindsay mentions, “It’s a lot more readable, it’s a lot more usable” (05:27), reflecting positive sentiments towards design tweaks.

• Folding Technology: Speculations around a foldable iPhone suggest a device that unfolds into an iPad mini-sized screen. Jason Snell elaborates, “It's like your phone most of the time and then unfolds into something the size of an iPad mini” (73:20). This aligns with Apple's reputation for blending functionality with elegant design.

• Dynamic Island Adaptations: The Dynamic Island, initially introduced in earlier iPhone models, may be adapted to accommodate the folding mechanism. Alex Lindsay hopes, “Keep the dynamic island” (64:57), indicating its popularity among users.

• Durability Concerns: The foldable design poses challenges related to screen durability and user experience. Leo Laporte expresses skepticism, “I don’t think I’m gonna buy it” (77:00), reflecting some hesitation within the team.

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5. Industry and Cultural News

The discussion also touches upon broader tech and cultural milestones.

• Ed Sheeran’s Streaming Success: Ed Sheeran stands out as the most streamed artist over the past decade on platforms like Apple Music and YouTube. Leo Laporte humorously recounts, “I have never attempted to kill once” (107:02), in reference to his playful interaction about Ed Sheeran’s reach.

• Apple’s Theatrical Ventures: Apple’s film “F1” is nearing $300 million in global ticket sales, making it Apple’s highest-grossing theatrical film. Andy Ihnatko remarks, “They don’t have to make money on it” (136:18), indicating that box office success is more about brand presence than direct profitability.

• Protest at Apple Store: An Extinction Rebellion protester was arrested for spray-painting anti-Tim Cook sentiments on Apple’s Fifth Avenue store. Leo Laporte comments, “They let them do it” (106:38), highlighting Apple’s ability to quickly clean and remove such vandalism.

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6. Product Recalls and Tips

Coverage of practical tech tips and safety recalls is also featured.

• Anchor Power Bank Recall: Anchor has issued a recall for certain power bank models due to safety concerns. Alex Lindsay shares his experience, “It came right off” (117:56), and advises listeners to check Anchor’s website for recall procedures.

• Unconventional Uses of Sous Vide: A Reddit user shared a creative tip on using sous vide machines to loosen the adhesive in iPhone repairs. While playful, this underscores the innovative spirit within the tech community.

• Arctech Keyboard Case for iPad Mini: Alex Lindsay praises the Arctech keyboard case, highlighting its functionality and aesthetic appeal despite adding weight to the iPad mini. Leo Laporte humorously remarks, “It's cute” (113:58), appreciating the blend of practicality and style.

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7. Promotions and Advertisements

The episode includes promotions for sponsors and community initiatives.

• Spaceship Domain Registrar: Leo Laporte advertises Spaceship as a modern domain registrar offering competitive pricing and innovative features like Thunderbolt for encrypted messaging. He encourages listeners to visit spaceship.com TWIT for more details.

• 1Password Advertisement: Promotion for 1Password’s Trelica service, emphasizing its capability to manage and secure SaaS applications. “Discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not” (25:21).

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8. Closing Remarks and Community Engagement

The hosts wrap up with discussions about their respective projects and upcoming content.

• Club Twit and Community Events: Leo Laporte highlights the benefits of joining Club Twit, including access to events like AI user groups, photo shows, and book clubs. He encourages listeners to subscribe and engage with the community.

• Book Club Highlight: The show’s book of the month, “This Is How You Lose the Time War,” is praised for its engaging storytelling and beautiful prose.

• Upcoming Projects: Andy Ihnatko announces the relaunch of their conversation series on Substack, featuring interviews with industry experts like Richard Haas from Foreign Affairs.

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Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte: “The problem is that the Trump administration has not moved. They’re here for four years. Apple wouldn't even have the factory done in four years, like to put to build a factory.” (17:23)

• Jason Snell: “It is the most drama-free, stable environment I've seen for a while in terms of these summer betas.” (09:26)

• Andy Ihnatko: “Navarro is an idiot. Like, he's just a complete buffoon.” (18:38)

• Alex Lindsay: “Apple has completely negated the whole problem by making the dynamic island part of the user interface, so that actually looks like something magical is happening.” (65:00)

• Jason Snell: “It reminds me of the early days of personal computers, where it's like, it costs what? And it does nothing, but it's the future.” (83:22)

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Conclusion

Episode 980 of MacBreak Weekly offers an in-depth exploration of Apple’s strategic challenges and innovations amidst a shifting global landscape. From supply chain hurdles and software enhancements to visionary product rumors and AI developments, the discussion provides valuable insights for tech enthusiasts and industry insiders alike. The hosts also engage in cultural commentary and practical tips, making this episode a comprehensive listen for anyone invested in the tech world.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex, and Jason are all here. We'll talk about the rock and the hard place that Tim Cook is wedged right in there between. Also, how much more your next Apple Watch or MacBook might cost thanks to tariffs. We'll also talk about the new designs for the next iPhone. That and a lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly. Episode 980, recorded Tuesday, July 8, 2025. I have never ate. Tomato, ketchup, onions. It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Hello, everybody. Time to talk about the latest news from Apple with andy Inocco of inotgo.com Alex of OfficeHours Global.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Hello. Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

And the legendary wizard Jason Snell. Sixcolors. Com. I don't know. Are you a wizard?

[Jason Snell]

And I'll put my hood up so I can.

[Leo Laporte]

There he is. He's a wizard.

[Jason Snell]

And a blessed prime day to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa asked me this morning, okay, what should we get on Prime? I said, absolutely nothing. I'm kind of an anti Amazon guy these days. I don't know why that is. There's still stuff I have to buy, but increasingly the stuff that I want is no longer sold locally because they've basically put everybody out of business. Our independent bookstore is not quite closing down, but it's getting rid of 60% of its space and eliminating its used books floor. And I blame Amazon, but I also blame myself because every time I go into the bookstore to look for a book, they don't have it. And then I go to Amazon and order it for the next day.

[Jason Snell]

Our friend, our friend Glenn Fleischman has a website where you can look up and find used books and stuff. And he's just using, you know, a search engine to do it. It's very clever. But he said that the used book market went from being like this kind of amazing adventure where you never knew what you were going to find and you might get a good deal. And then the Internet came in and there was like this period where used books became like, oh, now I can get a used book anywhere. And the prices were kind of all over the place, but you could finally find it thanks to the Internet. And he says, Now, 25, 30 years into this, it's reached the point where you can find any book that's ever been published used somewhere for almost nothing, right? So it's like it's completely flattened it.

[Alex Lindsay]

This library has a really wonderful. Instead of having like a Once or twice a year, book sale. They have, like, sort of a section that's just nothing but, like, donated books and movies and stuff like that that you can buy really, really cheap. And I never know how to react when I see somebody, like when I see one of those book scanners there, where they just have piles and piles of books are going beep, beep, look. Just basically trying to clear out all the ones that they. That have any value whatsoever so they can sell them. Because on the one hand, it's. They're there to be sold. The money benefits the library. That's the whole purpose of them being there. On the other hand, it just seems gauche, doesn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's like when Anthropic scanned all those books and the judge says it was okay because you destroyed them after you scanned them. So they bought them. Fair use. You bought them, scanned them, and then destroyed them.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The ones that they scanned and destroyed. But I think the problem was, is what other websites. That was the other.

[Leo Laporte]

They have far more volumes in the.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's like, look. Look good here. Like, look at what we're doing here while we're, like, grabbing almost 90% somewhere else.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, that's enough of that. That's enough of Leo's gripes for the day. Let's. You brought up Amazon Prime Day.

[Jason Snell]

That's why it's true. Happy Prime Day to all who celebrate.

[Leo Laporte]

And I feel so bad for all the bloggers, all the people, even at Consumer Reports, Nicholas De Leon, who was on Sunday on Twitter, said, yeah, we gotta do all the Prime Day coverage. It's like, you don't have to. Were you. Did they do that, Jason, when you were back at the magazine, or. No, it hadn't happened.

[Jason Snell]

We would do that a little bit because there's affiliate marketing. Basically, you're getting a kickback, you're getting traffic, and you're getting a kickback. And so everybody does it. Now, I. We. We did that a little, but we tried not to do it very much. I do have a friend who works for a tech website. And he. I was like, hey, I want you to be on my podcast. And he was like, well, not this week, because it's Prime Day. And I'm like, oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want to get. It's not a light.

[Jason Snell]

I'm sorry. Gotta get out of there.

[Leo Laporte]

Bad day.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I signed up for streaming on Amazon, which I've never done, but I signed up as a curiosity. And. And of course, yeah, last week there was a lot of emails, like, here Are all your incentives?

[Leo Laporte]

Let's face it, the Internet is completely inside. I opened our spreadsheet. We do our show rundowns in Google sheets, and of course Google said, hey, you want copilot to analyze this? Hey, hey, hey, hey. And even when I said no, it left a little toolbar just floating there, just in case I changed my mind. So annoying. What a world we live in. What a world we live in. But there are many other things to complain about. The good News is on iOS 26, beta 3, Apple's dialing back liquid glass.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it seems like they've turned off the liquidity and turned into just frosted glass.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what?

[Jason Snell]

I mean, the liquid also involves it, like, sort of like having some animations and stuff. We'll see if this is like a permanent retrenchment or if then they dial it back. You know, I feel like they're tuning it in a little bit and. And we'll see whether it's. It stays this way or if it goes back.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you played with the Beta 3, Jason? You installed it already?

[Jason Snell]

I got them on all the stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the indicator you were looking for for the public beta like this once beta 3 comes out?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, this is what I said last week, which is they'll probably release a developer beta next week, and assuming that it doesn't have horrible bugs in it, that can't be. You know, then they would go a week and do a public beta. I think that is a likely scenario. But, you know, they also have a possibility that it's bugs and they fix them because they sometimes do that where the public beta is a new build number, but it's because they identified, like a little problem, but otherwise they think it's fine. But they don't want the beta. Public beta always kind of trails the developer beta. So developer beta is like your sense of danger and public beta. They wanted to be like, okay, we spent a week and nobody died, so now it'll be the public beta. So if I had to bet, I would say, you know, next. Next week sometime will be the time.

[Alex Lindsay]

Apple did say by the end of July. Didn't think for the public first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they said next month. But yeah, yeah, they said, yeah, but.

[Jason Snell]

This, to me, this feels like the. And like I said last week, the most likely scenario was that There'll be a beta 3 this week, which there was, and that then that would be the candidate. And Apple will never talk about this, but that's sort of what goes on behind the scenes, is that this is the candidate and if all things are okay, it may be what, you know, either is the public beta or forms the public beta with like, some minor updates. And then you know that that will proceed throughout the summer. You get the developer betas and then you get a public beta release and when. When they're comfortable that the developer beta is okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're developer beta 3 for iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and Mac OS 26. All three came out yesterday. So. Okay, we're ready to go then. Anything we should watch out for? I think you're all using the beta Dellbert beta, right? In some form or fashion?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep. I'm using it on the iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Alex, are you playing with it or you're Mr. Production Machine?

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, no, I haven't gotten them on my OSes yet, but. But on my iPhone I have it on there. It looks nice. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have to say that develop the beta 3. Maybe it's because it looks. It's a, it's a step forward, it's not a leap forward. So I like it more. But I'm, I'm, I'm keen to see if they dial it forward a little bit more because even I was surprised at, like, whereas the first one was gloopy and glossy and very like 1980s, I thought this version is. The beta 3 is. It's a lot more subtle, it's a lot more readable, it's a lot more usable, but it's also not quite as dramatic. And now that I'm kind of used to it, I'm kind of appreciating some of the little touches, like when you have, like tab bars and we have slider controls. Like, there is actually the liquid part is that there's some chromatic. There's some chromatic dispersion. So you can see a little bit of a rainbow effect, like just on the trailing edge. Not so much that it calls attention to itself, but if you're looking for places where Apple decided to flex how powerful the GPU is on the. On Apple silicon, this is where they decided to waste those duty cycles. It's very nice. I'd like to see them be a little bit. Now I'd like to see them be even just a touch more aggressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this just in. TVOS came out today. Beta 3. So now we're. Now we're complete. We have the full armor set and all the buffs associated thereon. And presumably again next week, I have not installed any of it. Any caveats for those of us who are holding back to the public Beta, anything.

[Jason Snell]

I usually do a whole string of caveats about betas, right? Like, back up your stuff, which you should do, of course, and all of that. But I will say this. It is the most drama, free, stable environment I've seen for a while in terms of these summer betas. There are, as we've talked about with Liquid Glass, there are some issues involving how it looks, but I've been able to do my work just fine with, you know, with all of these devices. Again, if you're somebody who ekes every last minute of your, you know, battery time out of your iPhone, don't install a beta because the battery life is bad, right? Like, because that's. It's a beta, it's not optimized, it's not ready. But in terms of functionality, I have not had that situation where I'm like, oh, no, I put it on my Mac and now I regret everything because nothing works right. It's like, it's all been fine, at least so far. You know, things happen. You just have to kind of accept that they're going to be weird things. Like, I was using the iPad today attached to an external display, and I tried, and I was dragging a window around, and the shadow of the window was on the iPad, even though the window was on the external display. I was like, it's like it had a ghost. It's like, it's beta. Stuff like that happened, and then the Windows server quit, and so it all went blank. And then it came back, and I'm like, you know, stuff like that happens in the beta. So if you're not comfortable with that sort of thing, don't do it. But it hasn't been a stopper for me. And sometimes you install these betas historically, and they are stoppers, and you're like, oh, God, I can't do my work on this computer. And I haven't experienced that at all with any of them this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Very exciting. Apple Watch Ultra is going to be updated. Will they? Is the Apple. The Watch OS? Is it 26? It must be, right?

[Jason Snell]

It is. They're all 26. I haven't done that one. That's the one that I just have decided I don't need to cause trouble with my Apple Watch. I got Dan Morin writing that story. Dan Moran's writing that story for six colors, so I don't have to do that one. So I'm just gonna hold off for a little while.

[Leo Laporte]

He's the one who. He was the guinea pig this time, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, he gets that One tag.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He also is writing about his Vision os. Yeah, they got him scary eyes.

[Jason Snell]

I was telling my Apple PR guy, I was like, you know, Dan and Leo are both. You know, we're actually expressing interest in trying Vision Pro out a little bit. And they're like, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

They said, okay, we'll get up, but who's Leo again? Who's that Leo guy?

[Jason Snell]

They didn't even.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't even do that.

[Jason Snell]

I think that I pointed out to Apple's Vision Pro PR person that there is no podcast that covers Vision Pro. Better you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Please don't injure yourself. I don't. True. Probably. They don't know you're associated.

[Jason Snell]

The leading Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

We are the leading Vision Pro.

[Jason Snell]

We have a theme song and everything. I mean, it is. I think we're out.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Who else has a theme song? No one.

[Jason Snell]

We are on the cutting edge of Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That's a concept.

[Jason Snell]

Dan Got it. It's fun because he's, you know, he's using 26, so he got.

[Leo Laporte]

He got a new one. Good for him.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's. Well, I mean, I don't know new. It was probably a review unit from. So he's got a stern. It's a loner, but yeah. So we'll see how it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nice. All right, good. I'm trying to do all the happy stuff before we get to the tariffs. I might as well. Okay. The story begins with China weirdly pulling 300 employees out of Foxconn India. Remember that? Apple announced that they were planning or not. They didn't announce. Maybe it was just a rumor.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

What. Yeah. Apple said they were going to start moving their iPhone proproduction to India, and by 2027, they hope to have at least a quarter of it coming out of India. To which the Chinese Communist Party apparently responded. Not so fast, Timmy. Maybe just as a demonstration of the fact that they control even those plants in India.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep, very much so. Because it's not just the personnel. It's also the. It's also the equipment. It's also the expertise.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Like if.

[Alex Lindsay]

If China were to shut it down completely, then India would have a very long Runway to be able to get back to doing 94% of the assembly of iPhones in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or is it, you know, what's the problem with the geopolitical situation?

[Jason Snell]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

It also could merely be, you know, a threat to Donald Trump. It could be like, oh, wait, you know, don't tariff. Don't tariff us, bro. It's just unknown. It's just unknown. We can only observe that 300 Foxconn employees were told to return to China.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, also, India is a major manufacturing threat. They've shown how quickly they can mobilize.

[Leo Laporte]

Only the Taiwanese staff remain. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, but all.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Of the Chinese nationals were most likely. The Chinese nationals are the ones that know how to do it. The Taiwanese are the ones that designed it, that manage it. The. But the Chinese are the. Probably the ones that were actually working in the factory. Because a lot of times what you want to do when you're doing any kind of this type of thing is surround a person who knows what they're doing with a bunch of people that are learning, have them guide them. So by pulling those 300 out, they probably pulled all the operational people that were sitting next, you know, shoulder to shoulder with the folks that were. And it just makes it much harder to. To evolve.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we've learned so much about this whole process from Patrick McGee's excellent Apple and China book. Andy, did you get it back from the library?

[Alex Lindsay]

There's another person waiting for it. So I did have to return it, but I have to order my own copy now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I haven't finished it. But really the tale is how Apple. I don't want to say inadvertently, but it was an unintended consequence of Apple moving all its production to contract manufacturer and then ultimately to contract manufacture in China. Terry Gao of Foxconn was so accommodating, and the Chinese government, most very importantly, was so accommodating. They said, sure, we'll build a city here. We'll build iPhone city here. Sure, we will get migrant labor from the hinterlands and bring them in just for you, Apple. But the tit for tat was, Apple, you'll teach us how to make iPhones and all the accompanying technologies. And, you know, the handcuffs are only, we can do it now. There's no way to get this done anywhere again.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Again, this is. It sounds like it's a Chinese plan, but this has happened in many different places where it's just. Especially when you have a complex process. You know, the. You know, you look at the AKM fire that happened right before COVID right at the beginning of COVID the AKM fire, Basically, there was one factory that buil built all the analog to digital converters.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the add converters. That's right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For everyone. And suddenly the price went from $3 to $250 because there was just nothing, you know, and, well, that's part that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Just because it takes a while to spin up a factory. But those legacy nodes aren't hard to spin up. I mean, they're. It's not. It took EUV manufacturing you don't need.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, but, I mean, that was a simple process and it would take years to do that. I mean, because you have to build a new factory, you know, building new factories. You know, it's. It sounds easy, but it's years, years of, you know, just, just pouring all the concrete and getting it all working. And that's in Bob's in place. It's a thing, you know, and that's something simple. That's an A to D converter. That's not an iPhone. And, you know, the thought that this is, you know, it's going to take a decade. We've talked about this before. It's going to take a decade for Apple to have places, and that's, if everything goes well, for them to really have any significant production outside of, let alone the United States, which is absurd.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is Tim Cook between a rock and a hard place. Trump's trade advisor has accused Cook of not moving production out of China fast enough.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm afraid I don't, I don't agree with a lot of what Elon Musk does, but I will say that Navarro is an idiot. Yeah, like, he's just, he's just an idiot. Like, I don't know how to. Like, it's just hard to listen to his mouth open and shut and just not think, what an idiot. Like, every time he talks, he's an idiot, you know, and so the idea that they should move faster, faster than a decade, because that's as fast as this goes. Like, if Apple started now, they could produce maybe 2% of their phones to make somebody happy. A decade from now, six to seven years after Trump is no longer there, hopefully. I mean, I don't know, who knows how long Trump will be there. But the issue is that the problem that the Trump administration has is that they're not going. They're here for four years. Apple wouldn't even have the factory done in four years, like, to put to build a factory. So why, you know, there's this huge problem for Apple is, is that you've got this idiot who thinks that, that it would ever happen in the United States. And then you have, and he's saying, well, they got to go faster.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, he says, this is the quote. He was talking to Jim Cramer with all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's spoken by someone who has never worked in manufacturing, never done any of these things, barely knows his own job, let alone other people's jobs. I mean, you know, it's just a complete buffoon. Like, a complete buffoon. I usually don't get into this on the show, but, wow, is he a stupid person. Like, you know, like, it's just. You know, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's. It's ironic because I don't. We're just. We're talking about Apple here. This is Tim Cook's nightmare, is getting pressure from. Well, and one thing Trump and China agree on. I don't want you building in China. President Trump said he told Tim Cook, I don't want you building in China. Well, neither do the Chinese. I mean, they don't want him building in India. I'm sorry. Trump said, I don't want you building in India. To which the Chinese said, yes, but unfortunately, then Trump said, I want you building in America. To which the Chinese said, hold my beer.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think I agree with. Alex Navarro is a charlatan and a fraud and a fake, and he's got the ear of the most powerful man in the West. So that's great. But this quote I wanted to read, with all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that, I'm gonna make him like a Texas sheriff. It's inconceivable to me that Tim Cook could not produce his iPhones elsewhere around the world. And in this country, I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

Word means what you think.

[Jason Snell]

Gibberish. It is the closest I can to the genuine frontier gibber.

[Leo Laporte]

Inconceivable.

[Jason Snell]

The closest thing I can liken this to is. Is the dumbest quote ever in the. In the. In. In the recent era of tech, which is. That was a Washington Post article which was like, we could fix encryption by having the. The geniuses invent a secure golden key that is magical and that fixes encryption. And it's like, no. They're like, surely, you know, you could solve math with being smart. And it's like, but it's math. What are you talking about? This is that level of nonsense. It's like, you got the AI and things. You can make a phone in Iowa.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll do.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's crazy. It's just. It's nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

It actually makes you worry about their grasp of what AI is capable of, because they're putting more and more AI in the government now. They want the Social Security Administration to Run on AI. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, Lord. All right, so the tariffs, by the way, aren't. Not just in China. For instance, Max and the Apple Watch, which are manufactured in Thailand, are going to be facing a new 36% tariff in Thailand. So you can't move it to Thailand. That starts August 1st.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And again, even if you were going to move to Thailand, it would be years, years, years.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're already making the. Apparently they're already making the Watch and the Max, but they got it.

[Jason Snell]

They got to bring the Watch and the Max back to the US From Thailand. I guess that's the idea here. I, I think what this shows is that if it was a strategy to have a permanent floating crap game where like you never know where you're computer or your other Apple devices will come from, it could come from anywhere. And therefore, wherever the tariffs move, we're not there, we're somewhere else. We're dodging. We're like, that's not gonna work.

[Leo Laporte]

Once again, for those who haven't been paying attention, point out the tariffs are not paid by Thailand or India or China. They're paid by us.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, I think that one thing I will say that I think Apple could probably do a better job of is they could just say, hey, we're opening a whole new factory in Phoenix and we're breaking ground in six months and we're going to spend $100 million on it or $300 million or whatever number makes people happy. And then they start laying the concrete out for it. By the time the administration is complete, they will have all the concrete and the building will be up, and then the new administration will come in, whoever that is, and they'll go, you know what? You know, like, we don't think the manufacturing really work here. And we'll just put servers in, in a call today. You know, like, the thing is, is they could just announce that they're doing some kind of factory and just start pouring concrete. You know, they're going to use the building. And I just feel like doing an announcement that makes people happy. That seems to be all that really matters right now is making announcements that seem useful. So, you know, so I think that that would be, if I was Apple, that's what I would do. Like $100 million to make people happy is a lot less than tariffs. Right? You know, like our $500 million or a billion dollars of something that you could possibly multipurpose some other time, you know, to something else. You know, like, I just, I just feel like they could go down that path. I think part of it is. I don't know if Tim wants to stand next to the president again to talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he has to, unfortunately. That's your job, Tim. Sorry.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He's pretty good at it.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to kiss up.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Steve Jobs would never. When we always say, what would Steve Jobs do? He would never do any of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he'd give him the middle finger, which would not be the right thing to do, people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And he'd be doing stuff. And it would.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's a good one. So Apple also makes AirPods, iPads, the Mac Mini in Vietnam. Oh, okay, maybe that. Oh, wait a minute now. According to cnbc, Trump has announced a new trade deal with Vietnam that will increase Apple's costs because the tariffs, by the way, Trump continues to say Vietnam will pay. No, Apple pays these. You know, there are now two tariffs on goods imported from Vietnam. A 20% one Apple will have to pay, or a 40% tariff if. If goods. If goods originate outside Vietnam before being shipped from Vietnam. So if you manufacture some components in China, send them to Vietnam so you can put the Mini together and then send it to the United States. Yeah, that was intense.

[Alex Lindsay]

Close a loophole that they didn't like.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So it's at least 20%, Trump says, it's my great honor to announce I have just made a trade deal with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. One of two he's made. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm gonna try to keep it from being salty, but the problem is the other thing that you can't do. We've, you know, Amazon has learned and car dealers have learned is say this is the added cost here. That's the tariff that you're paying. You can't do that either. You have to somehow absorb it. Apple does have record high margins.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Could they absorb it to some degree. But at some point, you know, it doesn't. Doesn't pencil out. I mean, I think that everyone's trying to hold their breath with and absorb the tariffs, but at some point, what. What you do is you don't change the number when you. From the number that you've already released. But the next product is more expensive. Right. The next product adjusts for it. That the way you hide all of this and the way, you know, new.

[Leo Laporte]

They haven't announced prices, though, for. For this fall lineup. Right, Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So the thing is, is a new, you know, you price in all of those. All of the stuff without saying that it's affecting. You know, then you just have general Inflation problems, which then means that we have to keep the interest rates high.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I just thought I'd mention it's math.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That'S beyond the current, which might explain.

[Leo Laporte]

Why Apple wants to do that new Mac book. I hope they call it the MacBook nothing based on the iPhone chip. Maybe they can assemble that in the US I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I know. I mean, announcement and concrete is all they need. Announcement and concrete?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just start building.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Start building something. It's going to take. It'll take.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. You know what, Alex? I don't know if that'll work anymore. I think Trump's seen through that.

[Jason Snell]

How can you.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But, but the thing is, even if they were, even if they were, they.

[Leo Laporte]

Already said they were gonna spend 500.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I know, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Billion dollars in the, in the US building factories and, but that hasn't helped.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If, even if they were earnest, they couldn't move it any faster than four years. Like, you know, like, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

But they, but they have to. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, or they could. They could just build something that was building. Like, literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Why don't they use AI to do it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Or. I know, I know AI could figure this all out, but. But I think that barring letting AI figure this out, I would say you could build a factory in the United States that was making phones at a loss to make people happy for some period of time. Like, you could. I mean, like, these are all the dumb things that you might have to do to, you know, like, okay, we have a factory that's making phones and the phone could be making no money. It could be, you know, like putting out, you know, X number of phones a, a week and then the, you know, but it's 1%. Phones losing money and being 1% of the output is probably, you know, less than paying tariffs.

[Jason Snell]

The, one of the challenges with this is, look, I think what these guys want is a world where companies like Apple, like, you know, like auto manufacturers can make products or assemble products in the US that's what they want. And there's probably a way, assuming that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We could find enough people to make them.

[Jason Snell]

Well, yeah, I mean, look, just. I mean, this is what they want. It's their ideal. They want to. They, they want that as the idea.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it's a laudable plan. It's not that I don't want manufacturing.

[Jason Snell]

To come back to the U.S. it's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

A lot of plan. It's just not. It's, it's just not Acclimated to reality.

[Jason Snell]

Right? So this is, this is what I'm trying to say is, is they are, that is their goal is like look, it visualized a country in the United States where there are assembly plants for a great American company's products like Apple's products. Okay, how do you get there? And this is, this is the truth of it, which is even if you say okay, there is a future in which it's a thing that we all want to have those assembly plans in the U.S. how do you get there? And the answer is it's hard, it's expensive, it's complicated. And these guys aren't interested in any of that. They're just not, they're like tariffs, make it happen, magical, AI, whatever. And that's, you know, that's the problem with this is that they, they have a vision and they have no idea how to get there. Cuz they're not really. Are they really interested in getting there or they are they just really interested in rattling their sabers? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

In a way though, isn't this karma coming to bite Apple in the keister? Because they were quite willing to move all the manufacture offshore electronics company in the United States quite willingly moved.

[Jason Snell]

You know, but Leo, you read that book, there were so many different factors involving Apple ending up manufacturing so much in China. And a lot of it was the fact that the facilities elsewhere weren't doing a good job, were very expensive. Like I mean that's the problem. They tried it in Texas, they have tried it. But it's very hard to do that for lots of reasons including the historic standard of living in other parts of the world versus here and the fact that the U.S. i mean really, if we want to go on a time machine, what happened is the United States got really comfortable with the idea that we didn't have to do.

[Leo Laporte]

We're a service economy.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, we are a service economy. We didn't have to do five dollar an hour factory jobs anymore because other parts of the world would do those for us and we could have better paying jobs that were less backbreaking and that that was how we were going to do this. And that was like how the US benefited from globalization. And so when you have people like Navarro saying well the good news is. Or the, or the tre Secretary saying well the good news is, you know, you, in the future your kids will just work in a factory and their kids will work at the same factory as if that's a good thing. That's you know, pivoting on you know, 50, 70 years of American economic policy. If I'm Apple, I. I realize at some point that would you just. They will do exactly what came up earlier, which is they will start announcing new products. And Apple loves their slots. They love their 999 MacBooks. They love their, you know, the iPhone spread at 799 and 990 and 1199, and the next round will all be more expensive. And that'll just be how it'll be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, what's hard to do is plan for the future when economic policy changes so dramatic, 180 degrees.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We can say that this caught up with Apple, but fundamentally, Apple wouldn't be here without. Without the. What they did.

[Jason Snell]

Not the Apple we know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not the Apple we know. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The trillions of dollars that they've made since then is going to pay for. I mean, if you look back on it, it wasn't a mistaken mistake to go down this path. You know, it was a mistake had that be clairvoyant.

[Leo Laporte]

Because this was a path Reagan wanted. This was a path everybody was suggesting. This was the future of the country and the world. We did benefit globalization, we benefited a lot.

[Alex Lindsay]

And let's not forget that this was also in the 90s. This was also considered a plan of, here's how to turn Communist China into something closer to a capitalist democracy.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And it worked until the current ruling ruler.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's a good idea. China was becoming an easier and easier place to be until Xi Jinping.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Kind of. Kind of meaning in the sense that when you read back at, like, what policy was in the 1990s, it was never going to be as successful as they imagined that it was going to be. That there was always going to be a turn where, hey, we're going to keep communism and socialism, like, where it is. We're going to keep all the good and all the bad. We are still going to be very, very difficult to deal because we are, in fact, an independent nation with a couple of billion people in it. But thank you for giving us, like. More. Thank you for giving us economic security.

[Andy Ihnatko]

In the future and not to turn this into a Sunday morning show as opposed to Mac break. But the thing we also have to look at is with all the China stuff, is that China's population bomb is exploding like they are upside down, inside out, and they are on fire like their hair is on fire. And so anyone who thinks that China is, like, calmly managing all of this, what Trump is doing is poking them in the eye while they're being eaten by an alligator. So, so they're, you know, they're not going to respond well because they, they can't afford to lose anything right now because they are in so much trouble.

[Jason Snell]

Dan Rather joining us here with. We were homespun aphorisms everywhere.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I made that up. Right on.

[Jason Snell]

That was, that was really good. I thought that was Things would say for 100, please.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I watched a lot of Dan Rather.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's my favorite Dan Ratherism was, you know, they say that if, if Texas is not the whole electoral enchilada, it's at least a very large taco.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, somebody get that.

[Jason Snell]

92 election, I think 96 election. Yeah. If it's not the whole enchilada, it's a big taco.

[Leo Laporte]

Great.

[Jason Snell]

Okay. It's good stuff. I love it. Homespun aphorisms. It's very good. Yeah, no, you're right. This is, it's fascinating. I have, you know, I don't know, part of me keeps thinking that in the end it will be very hard for this administration to go hard at Apple because Apple is an American company and they have so many competitors, especially Samsung, that are outside the United States that could benefit by having the American government punish an American company. And that's why I keep thinking, like, I'm not sure how deeply committed they are to this. And they talk a good game. And I agree with putting some concrete and getting a shovel and saying we're breaking ground and showing, you know, some product that was assembled at great expense but will never ship in high volume. I think they know that's fake.

[Leo Laporte]

They have to give them some face saving too.

[Jason Snell]

But. Right, right, right, right. I think they know that's fake, but I think that they ultimately, if it gets them the visuals that they want and the narrative that they want, they may go around, you know, because it hurts them, it hurts the administration. If everybody's iPhones and Macs get more expensive, it hurts. If Apple is. Seem to be suffering and that Samsung is advantaged due to moves by the American government. All of these things are actually bad for them now. You know, they do lots of things that we look at and say that seems bad, but they still do them. But I just, I keep thinking, like, ultimately Apple may get off a little lighter here in the long run, but in the short run, it feels like if I was at Apple, I would just be prepared for, I mean, not prepared for war, but like prepared for eating all the tariffs and, you know, and Raising all the prices and dealing with all of the follow that comes from that politically and, and in terms of sales, because that's, that's what they are.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have a choice.

[Jason Snell]

They don't.

[Leo Laporte]

And it may not even just be Apple and the Trump administration. These may be global tidal shifts that are happening anyway. And who knows, you know, it's hard to resist the tide.

[Jason Snell]

Sure, there's a lot. And the government, you know, government can do bad things to your industry. Right. Like it's very, we've seen it now with the new bill passing. So I guess it's a big beautiful law now. It is, it's completely devastating for anybody who sells electric cars. Right. Because they've got it in for electric cars for some reason. And so by, by doing all of that and having tariff barriers like Chinese EVs are going to take over the world. And the only place where you won't have a lot of EVs is going to be in the United States where we'll still be driving big gas cars made in America by American companies and some other companies too. And, but like that's just, that industry just got a, got smacked and that's it. I mean, that can't happen. It seems weird to pick a fight with Apple, but yeah, that's where we are.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a break. That's where we are because in this great nation of ours, we still need to pay the bills. Jason Snell, Andy Inacco, Alex Lindsay. It's great to have you. Great to have all of you as well. Neck Break Weekly continues. We'll get to more pleasant topics in just a moment, including a new AI model from Apple for coders. Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. Who doesn't love Spaceships, right? This one is particularly cool. We've talked about it a few times here for good reason. It is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing domain name registrars. And I really think there's a great reason for it below market cost. Domain names, incredible. Hosting, virtual private servers, a lot of really sweet features. In fact, they just passed 3 million domains under management in less than 2 years. If you go to spaceship.com TWIT, you'll see why it is beautiful. It is beautiful. It is modern. And I think a lot of registrars are stuck still in the 90s. You don't get 3 million new domains in a couple of years without some real work. A clean, straightforward interface, innovative products and features. I've mentioned Thunderbolt. That is really cool. Nobody's done this. Yet all the encrypted messengers right now require a phone number or, you know, an account, some sort of login that can ultimately be traced back to you. Thunderbolt works very differently. It's your domain name. And by the way, for a business, isn't that great? You can communicate via your domain name end to end. Encrypted messaging with Thunderbolt. As soon as I heard about it, I went right to spaceship.com twit registered Leo's IM. Leos IM. Right, perfect. It's instant messaging. Leos IM. It cost me, I think it was like four bucks a year for the domain and I got Thunderbolt for free encrypted messaging using. That's all you need to know. LEOS im. And because I control that domain, no one else can use it. Another thing that really sets Spaceship apart, their low pricing. We're not just talking about new purchases here. A lot of people do that. Their renewal prices are also lower compared to other companies, making it a no brainer. Look, you could see it right here on this comparison chart on their website, making it a no brainer to consider transferring your existing domains. By the way, they make it easier to transfer your domains because you know how registrars kind of are sticky. If you've got a domain stuck with another registrar, transferring it to stick Spaceship is quicker and simpler than you might think. The transfer process is incredibly straightforward. It often completes within just 30 minutes. You don't need to wait for your current domain to expire. Once the transfer is complete, Spaceship will automatically add an additional year to your current registration. Oh, isn't that sweet? Plus you'll. Plus there's more. Yes, there's more. You'll receive a complimentary one year subscription to spacemail, their incredible email system giving you professional business email. So now there's really no reason not to move your business domains and your personal domains to Spaceship. And there are a lot of reasons to do it. To discover how much you can save compared to your Current Registrar, visit Spaceship.com TWIT and follow the link at the top of the page. Ready to switch and save. Transfer your domain to spaceship [e-mail] TWIT and if you do sign up for a domain and you set up Thunderbolt, message me at Leos Im. I've been meeting some lovely people that way. Spaceship.com TWit could Apple be considering launching a public cloud? What does that even mean, a public cloud? This is the story here, right here. Since I can click it from the information, which often has good inside information, this Is Aaron Tilly writing the service would run on Apple's chips could potentially handle certain workloads. Oh, to compete with. I get it. To compete with AWS could potentially handle certain workloads more efficiently than the major cloud players. Apple sees its cloud as potentially useful for tasks like artificial intelligence inference, the process of using pre trained AI models to interpret new information. What do you think Apple competing with Amazon and Google and Oracle and the rest?

[Alex Lindsay]

Certainly not at the same scale.

[Leo Laporte]

They'd have to offer some secret sauce that the others.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it would be as a service towards things that are more Mac related. I don't think it's like a general purpose cloud solution. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing Apple would do. So I think it's more of a, you know, backing up other things that are related to it.

[Leo Laporte]

What's maybe one of the things they would offer is this weird new coding language model. You know, Apple's kind of laggard as we've talked about many times before in AI. But they have their own models and one of the hottest areas of AI right now is vibe coding. Using AI to code with, whether it's Claude code or you know, ChatGPT has something, all of the companies do it. Apple has put a new AI model on Hugging face but it's not a me too. It's not just like the other ones. It's using something new that allows it to break up the answers into multiple pieces. So normally LLMs code kind of linearly when you ask them something. This is a very good write up by the way, from Marcus Mendez. At nine to five max when you ask them something, they process your question, predict the first token of the answer, then we go through the question with the first token, predict the second token, and so on. So in other words, you know, in a linear fashion. LLMs also have a temperature setting that controls how random the output could be. That's so that they don't say the same thing each and every time. A lower temperature means it's more likely to choose the most probable token. You get high, then you're going to have more fuzziness and more randomness. An alternative to this system is something called a diffusion model. In fact, stable diffusion, longtime image generation favorite, now replaced by some others. And you've seen it happen with stable diffusion. It starts with a noisy image, removes the noise and steers it towards an actual image. So Apple's now doing this with diffucode7b cpgrpo. Apple has a paper called Diffucoder Understanding improving masked diffusion models for code generation. By allowing the temperature to increase to increase the randomness, it becomes more flexible in the order of its token generation. So it's no longer a linear model and apparently can generate higher code quality code with fewer passes. This is not something you think of Apple being good at now. The base model is not an Apple model. It's Qwen, the Alibaba model from China, which is also kind of interesting. QN has its own coder. Do you say Qwen or qn? I say qn, but if you say Quinn, then I'll believe you. Diffucoda actually scores pretty well. Not as well maybe as the best coders out there, but it's in the, it's in the ballpark. So good on you, Apple.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was, I was struggling. I, I was and still am struggling to understand exactly all the technical stuff about this, but I was reading about, I was, I was. People who are like actually in this business who were talking about it on Reddit and other public forums were saying that they're saying they're doing things that are similar to what you see in Gemini, but they did say that this is something fresh and there's an interesting new model.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where you got deep secret. When companies can't compete head to head, they try often different things and sometimes it's a good thing. Apple, this from the article 9 to 5, has been laying the groundwork for its generative AI efforts with some pretty interesting and novel ideas. And this is one of them.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, and it's what's. How many weeks in a row have we seen the Apple Intelligence Research Group release an interesting paper that doesn't simply say, oh, here's what our version of something is. But hey, we've got this paper that basically says that deep learning models don't actually work when you apply puzzles to them. Week after week after week, we've been seeing these kind of papers that are easy to turn into a headline. I'm not saying that their research isn't genuine. I'm just saying it's interesting that now they're. I believe that I wonder if Apple has some sort of a little like internal, internal motivation to say we have to. We're not going to be able to release anything to the public for a while yet. Let's make sure that we're keeping ourselves in the headlines as an actual participant in this race to create really interesting and really useful AI. We are actually doing the foundational work towards all these features that we're trying.

[Andy Ihnatko]

To build I mean, I think the hard part for that, for Apple is, is that they're not ready to start paying $15 million a year for some of their researchers. They're not seen as leaders in AI. They're not. You know, and so the hard part is just the brain drain of, you know, they lost one of their top folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, we'll talk about that in a second.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And, and so, but I, and I, and I just don't think that, So I think that they have to do something to kind of, if it's not so much that they need to do something right now, but, you know, how do you, how do you keep moving forward if you keep losing most of your best talent?

[Leo Laporte]

What was it the, the slogan for Avis when Hertz was the number one rental car? We're number two. We try harder. Yeah. If you're number 12, you might try even harder. Diff View coder is available on Hugging Face. Hugging Face is great because you can try all these different models on their, on their servers. It's not a giant model. It's a 7B model. Seven billion parameters. So it's not a very powerful model. So it's an interesting thing if they can use, you know, some novel techniques to get great performance. Now let's talk about the departure, because this is an example of how it's really hard when you've got somebody like Mark Zuckerberg writing giant checks. It can be very challenging to keep up. Zuck has stolen an Apple researcher by writing a really big, really big check. Tens of millions of dollars a year. We'd heard this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, if you're a researcher, I mean, this is your.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not?

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is your moment. And how did Apple get them?

[Leo Laporte]

They stole them from Google by doing the same thing. Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just not as big.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Roming Pang, who manages Apple's Foundation Models team, that's pretty important, is going to Meta. He was in charge of a team of 100 employees that work on Apple's large language models. According to Bloomberg, Meta lured Pang with a deal worth tens of millions of dollars per year, which they've also been doing to OpenAI, much to Sam Altman's chagrin. Anthropic and scale AI. Scale AI. They basically bought the company. And there's some question about whether Mark got what he paid for when he. Sorry, Meta. Bought the company, but Mark got what he paid for when he bought.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Meta is willing to do this. I think that the hard part is that the inflation across an entire company. You can't just Go and start talking to everyone that's in your AI and say hey, how about we increase your pay by 10x or 100x or whatever of what it was before without having. What about all the other people coding, all the other things all over the company? Start to feel like suddenly that you know, there's a morale issue. There's a, you know, there's a whole process there that I think is super difficult for most of these companies to kind of pros to like manage inside of that, that conversation. Meta's decided, you know, they're going to go for it but I'm not sure if they got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple distinguished engineer, which is, you know, a pretty high level guy. Bloomberg says the takeaway from Mark Gurman Pang's departure could be the start of a string of exits from the AFM group. With several engineers telling colleagues they're planning to leave in the near future to go to Meta or elsewhere, it's hard to turn down all that money. Can Apple say okay, okay we'll meet that?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean they can. I don't think they can because I think, I mean they can. You can do anything once but, but you can. But I think that the problem that they have is again it opens up all these cans of worms all across the company of all these people working on quote unquote important projects and how much. I mean they're all getting paid pretty well but they're going to want a lot more if you start paying people tens of millions of dollars a year.

[Alex Lindsay]

And also remember that the benefits to Apple of this kind of investment aren't nearly as great as they would be to Meta or OpenAI or to anyone who is trying to do AI as a service or basically running cloud compute AI for, for, for, for endless lines of customers. Apple's really their, their majority of the focus is always going to be on device AI. Let's make sure we can sell more iPhones, sell more iPads. If it me if it also means that if this, this, these discussions about having some sort of a cloud AI, cloud computer service come to fruition, that's nice too. I mean they have all these wonderful in house AI chips that they can put into play but it's always going to be the priority is going to be on device AI. They're not going to be the company that comes up with the most amazing image generator. They're not going to be the company that creates the next great movie is going to be made using Apple video generative AI. That's not what. So they're not going to get that kind of payback from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on personnel. So unfortunately, that means that they can't really keep these people in a seller's market for labor. You just got to let people go.

[Jason Snell]

Also, I mean, I don't know, because they're a black box. I don't know what's going on inside of Apple and I don't know who these people are, but I find it disingenuous when there are reports about how Apple is behind and how Apple's models aren't good enough. And then there are also reports about, oh no, Apple is losing senior executives who have been in charge of building its models. And that's a brain drain for Apple because one of those is probably not true, right? Like, this is the thing, Is this a loss? Is this person wonderful? And the reason that Apple's models aren't up to snuff is because they've been beaten down by the man and haven't executed? Or is it that Apple looks at somebody like, because here's the thing is you could, you might not want to meet the goal of, you know, the offer of somebody like Meta, but I can put it the other way, which is if it's somebody who you don't think is worth it, you don't try to match their offer, you let them walk. And I, I just, again, I don't know whether this person is brilliant or not. But I can say this. If one of Apple's issues is that their models haven't been that great, paying lots of money to keep the people who have been building the not great models doesn't make sense. And I think Andy makes a very good point, which is you want a team at Apple who is devoted to building great AI models using Apple's priorities. And I think that's an important way to view this, which is Apple is going to prioritize on device models and they're going to prioritize maybe models tuned for developers, right? Like tuned for developers and their developers and to work with Xcode. But like, number one is running on an iPhone. That's their number one goal. And if, you know, if that doesn't appeal to you and you'd rather be dealing with a giant cloud model, then maybe you shouldn't be at Apple. Apple needs talented people to build models for them. But I don't think it's existential necessarily. If Apple ends up being a company that builds really good, efficient models that run on its devices and then it partners with companies that have big Open cloud models to do big open world knowledge cloud jobs. I think that is okay. So we can't. My point is we can't really know, but I think it's very weird to be in a position where we're lamenting Apple being behind on models and also lamenting that they lost somebody who is key in developing their models. Like, I don't know what the truth is there, but. But sometimes you let them go because you don't want to pay to keep them. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman's. The presumption is that morale is sinking at Apple's foundation model team because of this. You know, oh, we're going to look over at Anthropic and chatgpt.

[Alex Lindsay]

Maybe we'll use. There are a lot of possibilities.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean, morale is low when you lost, right? I mean, morale is low when you lost. And if the perception is that they have to go to an external vendor to get a model because your model's not good enough, I mean either, I mean, I have to say that's probably because your model's not good enough, otherwise they would use it. And that I understand, understand morale could be low. But, like, that's not Craig Federighi's and, and you know, and the rest of the people in that team, it's not their job to hurt Apple's products in order to promote their own fundamentally weak set of models. If they believe that they're, they're weak. So, like, this is, again, you don't want an exodus of AI talent, but if the AI talent you've got is not doing the job and it's not because of bad management, then, you know, you need to recast. And there are ways to do that. There are ways to motivate the people in that team and say, look, we are only going to use an external model for Siri in the short term because our model is not up to speed. But that's your challenge is get it up to speed. Because we rather use. This is Apple, we want to use our own model, but right now, for the next year or two, it's not going to be your model and that's your goal. And that if that demotivates people, then I think so be it. But I think that's how they have to play it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's an interesting. Tim has to fight on many fronts these days.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, I don't, I just, it's. It's an unpleasant thing to say, but, but one way to read this situation is that the people building Apple's AI models have failed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And that an exodus and a rebuilding of that team with a new alignment and new management is maybe what they have to do. So, so, so be it. But, but again, it also could be the opposite. It could be that the leadership at the high level, John, Gianna Drea perhaps, or, or even above him to Tim, maybe they've been horribly mismanaged and they've had enough and they're going to leave. And that's also a possible scenario here. But when you get stuff being ripped out of one group and placed in another group with new management because things have gone badly, this stuff's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

This stuff's gonna happen.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I didn't, you know, insert your own word there for stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuff's gonna happen.

[Jason Snell]

Stuff happens, as they say.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a bumper sticker, as they say. Let's take a little break. We will have more in just a little bit with a very smart panel. Jay Sisnell, Andy Anako, Alex Lindsay. It's their expertise we count on to break down what is really happening because there's a lot happening. It's a very interesting world as we live in. More to come in just a bit, but first a word from our sponsor. 1Password I know you know 1Password but did you know 1Password could help you with shadow it? Over half of it pros say that securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl in your business and shadow it, it's not hard to see why. But Thankfully Trelica from 1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not. Discover and secure access to all of your apps, managed or not. Trelika by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company and then pre populated app profiles. Assess SaaS risks letting you manage access, optimize, spend and enforce security best practices across every app your employees use. Now you can manage shadow it, you can secure. It's got some other benefits like securely onboarding and off boarding employees and it also meets compliance goals. Trelica T R E L I C A By 1 password I know how to spell that provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. It's just one of the ways that 1Password's extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password, award winning password manager trusted by millions of users and over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn more at 1Password.com MacBreak that's 1Password.com MacBreak all lowercase. And you can see there's a video there will explain everything Trellica can do. It's very cool. 1Password.com MacBreak thank you 1Password for supporting Mac Break Weekly let's start talking about iPhone 17 because we're probably, they're manufacturing them right now at a secret location somewhere in Asia. Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

What do you think about sky blue phones?

[Leo Laporte]

Are they going to be sky blue? We're getting all these, that was all these rumors now.

[Alex Lindsay]

That was one of the rumors about the, about the iPhone 62017 Air. That's a fantastic new color that we've, that we haven't seen. Like, okay, so I'm tempted by the air.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I don't feel the need for a new iPhone, but I guess I, you know, I gotta get one. And one of the things about the Air that makes it interesting is it is different. It's thinner. Poorer battery life as a result, probably poor battery life.

[Alex Lindsay]

Probably. Probably. Let's let's hope that they whatever work they've been doing in developing the folding iPhone, they figured out how to make make thin hardware that's not going to break in your pocket. The camera system is not going to be as good. It's probably not going to be any bargain. You can imagine that it'll be at least as expensive as a regular iPhone without quite the same features, build quality camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a nice AI picture of what at least the Pro is going to look like with a different location for a little lower location. I mean, I mean, it's silly that this is what we're talking about for the MagSafe charging and a new camera bump that is even more aggressive. That's why the magsafe's a little lower.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm pretty excited about the bigger camera bump. I've always been like, give me an extra 3 millimeters if it will make the cameras that much better, if the optics will be that much clearer, that much better. Whatever you can do to improve the camera, it's fine by the time I, I mean, almost everybody puts it in a case. Maybe I shouldn't say almost everybody. But the thing is, the great thing about camera bumps is that like when you put it in a case it's no longer a bump. And by the time. If you spend that much money for a phone, I'm putting it with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Slim iPhone 17, it'll also have a bump, so it may slim below. It'll still be stacked up top. Is that what it's.

[Alex Lindsay]

According to the renders? Yeah, it'll have a horizontal. A horizontal bar, just like the pixel. It's like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I feel like with the pro version of whatever they decide to call it, I just feel like they could just get rid of the bump and just give us more battery and storage, you know, like. Like this is the pro model.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Like, that you have all.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to make the whole thing thicker. You're saying make the whole thing thicker.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just make the whole. Just give me more battery and, like, have it last, you know, because right now it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Generally my phone lasts a day, you know, from the. From when I get up to when I go to bed. If I decide to do any production with it, you know, actually shooting real footage, it lasts a couple hours. Like, it's. It'll. It'll chew that right up. So as a pro phone and speaking as someone who uses it in a pro environment every once in a while, it'd be really great if they just gave us. Gave us a different phone that was heavier, bigger. We don't care, you know, and it would move Apple a lot further forward with all of this production stuff that they want to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think it's. It occurred to me the other day that, like, Apple never got into the. Into the edition phones that never got into, like, hey, here's the super deluxe ceramic edition. Like, the way they dabbled with that with the Apple watch, where we're going to make some lines in better finishes, better materials, better luxury, and I'm perfectly fine with Apple. Apple does design so well, and their customers are not unwilling to part with a dollar. And so if there's a company that can do things like a slim phone or a folding phone and say, you know what? This costs a little bit more. But the styling on it is something that we think is really, really nice. Just like. Like, 100 years ago, people would spend money on a Tiffany cigarette case because it's part of what they put in their pockets every single day. And they want something beautiful and distinctive that reflects their tastes. I love to see Apple kind of go in that direction.

[Leo Laporte]

Rumor from Instant Digital on Weibo today, confirming something that Wayne Ma on the information set in November of last year is that the titanium is going to give way on the 17 probe to aluminum with glass on the back for part aluminum, part glass for the Magsafe charging and I guess for antennas as well. Aluminum lighter and cheaper than titanium. So you know, this might be another response to tariffs is maybe we cut costs in some areas. There is a rumor from another source that it will be A. The 17 air will have a mix of titanium. I don't know what that means so I like titanium. It's pretty light. Seems like it's a little tougher than aluminum.

[Alex Lindsay]

Anything that helps Magsafe is going to be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. New dynamic island according to digital post from digital chat station Another rumor mill yesterday. Although you know, these are I think are fairly. I mean this is what we'd expect as the supply chain starts to get their hands on these things. Just trying to make them the. The new dynamic island. Well, we don't know. The account said it didn't say specific details about the changes, just that there would be changes. Maybe smaller, I don't know, maybe bigger. Could be, yeah. What does it change? I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just hope they keep it. Like I love the dynamic.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny, they made a virtue out of a necessity with that hole punch.

[Alex Lindsay]

I will honestly say I was just thinking today that if I had to come up with a list of the 10 most just design genius moves that Apple has made where it's not just, hey, isn't it convenient, isn't it nice that they managed to fit this into this chassis. But solving a problem in a way that is profound and elegant and takes a perceived negative and turns it into an actual feature, I can't think of something that would dislodge that from the top five list. And so we've seen so many in the Android space, so many display manufacturers trying to say, oh look, we've got now we've got like the finger. We've got the cameras now completely underneath the display so you don't have any holes or any notches or anything like that. Apple has completely negated that whole problem by saying, well again we're going to make this into part of the user interface so that actually looks like something magical is happening with something that would be otherwise perceived as wasted space.

[Leo Laporte]

What other rumors do we have? This is an interesting rumor. Apple pauses work. This is from Digitimes on the foldable iPhone.

[Alex Lindsay]

Foldable iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Foldable iPad because they're so happy about their foldable iPhone.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, foldable iPhone. Looks like maybe is going to happen next year. The iPad thing. Now here's the thing. This is the product that nobody can make any sense of because it's like, is it an iPad? Is it a MacBook? Is it. It's like it's huge. So it's like it folds, then it's like a laptop, but it's running iPad OS. What does that mean? It's, it's. I'm not surprised that they're like, yeah, let's hold off on that one and focus on this iPhone. That makes sense. And that will probably sell a bunch of it.

[Leo Laporte]

We're pretty sure they're going to do a foldable something because they're buying those full. The screens from Samsung.

[Jason Snell]

No, the foldable iPhone it sounds like, is kind of a done deal and it's going be an iPhone that can fold open into something that's more like an iPad mini, which I mean again, one of the great things about this is that they have that existing stack of, of an operating system that can run apps in multiple, you know, multiple windows or in split screen and also take up the extra space and like they, they've got that part of it. So if they can make a pleasing foldable phone interface, I think that that makes sense. This larger object, it was really unclear kind of like what it even supposed to be. So it wouldn't surprise me that they're like, you know, that's, that's years out. Let's not worry about it.

[Alex Lindsay]

The Digital Times report had two bits in it, one of which that they're putting the foldable iPad aside for all of those smart reasons, partly that there's hasn't been any demonstration in the marketplace that, that, that anybody really, really wants this. I'm a big fan of foldables. I think the, the idea of being able to transport like a 14 inch each tablet in the space of like a paperback book is very, very appealing to me. But that might be just an Andy feature. But the other part of the story was that the foldable iPhone has gone into P1. So they got first prototype status and which is the next step along towards actually producing like a manufacturable product. And again, this is, this is exactly the sort of thing that I think that Apple should be doing. This is Samsung is their big event is this, this week. That's actually, I think it's tomorrow in New York City. And one of the things that they seem to be working on is not just the next generation of their own folding phone which has made leaps and bounds. It's now like a very very practical for people who can afford it. It's a very, very practical and usable thing. Not quite durable I would say compared to a regular phone but. But durable enough that if you take care of your toys you, you don't necessarily have to be afraid of it. But now they're making tri fold ones so that it is a somewhat chunky pocket phone that unfolds into something the size of like a 10 inch iPad and that is very, very much in line with my interests. I don't know that if I would have $2,500 to spend on such a thing but there are people who would be willing to spend $2,500 on such a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm glad me like that. That's not nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

I want you to buy it then tell me about it. But, but yeah, but I'm so Apple the stacks rumors stacking up about the foldable iPhone include things like they wanted to solve the problem of we don't want to have that ditch in the middle of the screen where the hinge is which I don't think is a huge. It's not a deal breaker. But leave it to Apple to say well no, that's an. That's definitely an aesthetic down downgrade and we don't want to do that. I'm sure they were also had problems with durability. Earlier models had problems where you can't make the surface of the screen as durable as a normal smartphone as a normal flagship phone. Those are probably things that they're also waiting to address. But once again Apple is a company that it's not going to be a cheap phone. It's going to be at least a $2,000 phone guaranteed because these panels are really super expensive. But there are people in the Apple ecosphere specifically that are very much willing to spend money on something like that. And I'm the sort of person who would. The number of times where I've said I could get away with an iPad mini and a phone for this entire weekend if I had the kind of scratch where I could say what if my iPhone were an iPad mini? What it could be that. What if I have. Then you talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

I wondered that way back in the day if I could put so many software on there that could take phone calls. Couldn't an iPad mini be a phone if you had cellular?

[Jason Snell]

Sure. Except they don't. Yeah, they don't do it that way. Your phone app will be on there.

[Leo Laporte]

Or something and give it.

[Jason Snell]

You could but back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

When I had a phone number from Skype, I could have done it. I don't know if there's.

[Jason Snell]

I'm with Andy though, about this. Like, it's not for everybody, but is there a use case where you say, oh, you know, I kind of like my iPad, but I also have to have an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

And then suddenly you're like, wait a second, what if it's one thing, if it fits your needs to be able to have your phone and then you unfold it wherever you're going and you've got a little iPad is really. I mean, it'll be super expensive, right? More expensive probably than buying a phone and an iPad mini. But you have it.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's just people buy the Samsung fold and it's like 2000.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, exactly. And there would be a benefit to it. It'd be pricey, but there would definitely be a benefit to it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Outside of. I guess I will still say that outside of press that have to cover this and people that are really. I just don't know anybody that bought a folding phone twice.

[Leo Laporte]

How many of you. I have had a number of Samsung folding phones. I have the flip right now and I like that because it's small, not because it's big, but I've also had the bigger fold and so forth. And I'm sorry, but that fold still bothers me, the crease.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Every time I see it, someone will show it to me, hey, look at it. And they open it up and I'm like, ah, there's a thing in the center that I would not be able to feel it.

[Leo Laporte]

And you see it. It also, in order to make that work, the screen has to feel rubbery. It's not glass because it's got to have a coating, a screen protector on it. So I feel like I like glass screens. I cannot lie.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it would be bad if that were the entire ecosystem. But again, as part of a product line.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it makes sense. There are people that want it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, and I do know the thing is it's not a general audience sort of thing. I do know people who have replaced were early adopters who then replaced it with another folding phone and who lust after like some of the stuff that's coming out of Huawei that they can't buy. So they're people for whom this is a solution to a problem and they are very glad to be able to.

[Leo Laporte]

What they're saying Apple would do is not what this flip is, which is a regular size phone that folds up into a tiny phone. But it would be a regular, it would be a regular size fold that unfolds into a larger phone. Like the fold.

[Jason Snell]

Yes, exactly. So you've got an iPhone most of the time and then when you get to your destination or you're in your seat on the plane or whatever, you unfold it and now you've got an iPad mini, basically.

[Alex Lindsay]

And interestingly, one of the sessions in WWDC was essentially a message to developers that we are no longer going to help you out if you don't. If you make apps that cannot simply resize themselves to fit in any arbitrary display they've been painted into, we are no longer going to help you out and make your dumb app look good into the middle of this display. Here's what you're going to have to do in order to fix all this stuff.

[Jason Snell]

I mean a big part of that. I know what you're going to say, which certainly works for this rumor, but it also has a direction, direct, immediate impact, which is in IPADOS 26, in multi window mode, it no longer is doing like resizing stops. You can resize to any point along the way. And if an app is bad at that shape, too bad, you better make it work.

[Leo Laporte]

This is something that Microsoft struggled with when they had that two screen fold Google struggled with when they've made the first Android tablets. It is, is kind of non trivial, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. But I think Apple's OS has an advantage here in that they've had iPad apps for so long and this is rumored to be four by three and that they also have the existing ability it used to be. In the current oss it's side by side, but in the new os, in the multi window view you can just flip and get a 2 up which if you've got a folding screen is going to be one on one side and one on the other plus arbitrary window. And I would imagine that all of that stuff would get picked up on a folding phone from Apple is that they would pick up essentially ipados would be what would be running when you unfold the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay. I don't think I'm gonna buy it. Sorry, Andy. Okay.

[Jason Snell]

I'll tell you, I always travel, I always travel with an iPad and you've got to have a phone with you. Right. So if, if I was traveling a lot, lot, I would seriously consider a product like this because it would get me, you know, my iPad would be with me in my pocket at all of the time. And right now that's not the case. But it's a It's a, you know, like, like Andy said, it's not for everybody. But the beauty of there was that moment where they, which was coming up 11 years ago where Apple did the iPhone 6 and they did the 6 in two sizes and not only was that big because it was the first big iPhone, but then they did the bigger iPhone on top of it. And one of the things that has really happened in the last five, six, seven years is Apple has really embraced that of it's a product line. And like we're not making now they're up to four different models a year and with the iPhone, probably five models a year, one in the spring and they may spread that out even further. But the rest of them are in the fall right now. And like once you've got five iPhones, it's like what Samsung learned. Once you've got five, six models, you can afford to do a model that is going to be really expensive. You're going to make a lot of money on each one you sell, but the volume is not going to be huge. It's okay when there are five or six models.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I also finally have to say that I do think that the, that the, that the iPhone 17 Air. I have to believe that if and when it comes out that that's part of the research that went into, went into the folding phone because they had to figure out how to pay. How do we put this on a slab that is super, super thin because we can't make this twice the thickness of an.

[Leo Laporte]

They get chunky.

[Jason Snell]

It's a brilliant. When the, when the air rumor started happening, that was my initial thought was oh, this is how they get to a folding phone. Is first off, do an entire cycle devoted to making things as thin as possible. And then the next cycle you've got a two plane thing that unfolds and then you've got your fold. Then you've got your.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's your clue. It's a two crumbs.

[Jason Snell]

The air is like step one, you know, and then step two is folding phone and. And that air again the same thing. You know, that air is going to be one of four iph this fall and it's not going to be for everybody and your priorities have to be very specific to get it. But I think it's going to be cool and interesting and is going to be great for some people and for everybody else. All the other iPhones are still available.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And you know, in the past I've kind of made fun of like oh hey, thank Goodness now my MacBook Pro is 2 millimeters thinner. Now I can take. I used to have to leave six pages of a comic book behind because I couldn't fit it into my laptop. But now I've got room for eight comic book pages. But the thing is, when you've got something that you hold in your hand all the time, it's amazing how much lighter a thinner device just feels.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it's not a trivial thing, so I'm not making fun of that at all.

[Jason Snell]

It's how I feel. I mean, we talked about this a lot when the new iPad Pros came out, and they were, you know, Apple's thinnest iPads ever. And it's like, did we need that? I'll tell you. I have the 13 inch. I have the big one, and I use it in a case, and then sometimes I put it in the magic keyboard. But then there's a lot of times when I'm kind of going in between and I just have it and there's no case on it. And it's just so great to hold. And it's like, I know it's 13 inches. It's huge this way. But it's so thin, and therefore it feels so light even because it's spreading that weight across all of that. It's kind of, again, it's a thing that can make your product feel great. It isn't necessarily a thing that should override other important aspects of the product, but having that in the back of your mind of, like, we could make it really thin, like, I'm not opposed to that. That can work.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the tagline for this show. Jason has the big one, and it's so great to hold.

[Jason Snell]

I got the big one.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Snell, Andy and Ako Alexander, Lindsay. I know. I have the big one, too. I like the big one a lot. I use it for my. It's like my Obsidian entry thing. And I read all my news articles on it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a really nice little tool.

[Alex Lindsay]

I would hold up my. Would hold up mine to the camera, but it is what I'm using for this zoom call.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't hold up your big one. No, no, no.

[Alex Lindsay]

As an external display.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes. You're watching Macrame Weekly. You might be sorry at this point, but you are. The Vision Pro segment is coming up. Prepare yourself.

[Jason Snell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

And a little tip. If you are not yet a member of the club, what are you waiting for? Club Twit is such a great thing. When we started Club Twit four years ago. Really. We kind of needed to. We were in the middle of COVID advertising was drifting away and we thought, well you know what, let's have the audience fund the show. That seems like the best way to go anyway was what I always wanted to do. Well, fast forward four years, 25% of our operating costs come from the club. The club makes it possible for us to do so much. We've got this great discord where you can hang out and have fun and talk with other like minded geeks, which is always great. You can watch the shows in the club and chat with us there too, which is, which is kind of nice. That's what they're doing right now. We also started putting together so many great events for the club. Our AI user group group and our photo show are coming up this Friday. Chris Marquardt will be reviewing pictures of Quirky of Quirky. That's our word of the of the month. And talking about the latest photo news. He's always a lot of fun. And then our AR user group immediately afterward. And I'm. I'm not sure we're going to talk about but it's always a great way to learn about how others are using AI. I want to talk about local models because I'm getting more and more interested in running my own AI in the house. So that may be one of the topics. Micah's Crafting Corner is the following Wednesday. A great chance to kind of chill and make something. Micah's working on Lego. I've done it with cooking and coding and knitting and it's been crocheting. The Book of the Month is, I think, really interesting. I just finished it. This is how youw Lose the Time War. It's our Stacy's Book club pick for August 8th. Join the discussion. It's not a long book. It'll be easy for you to read in plenty of time for a month from now. August 8th. This is how you lose the Time War. I listen to the audible version, which I recommend because it's two different it's an epistolary novel, two narrators.

[Jason Snell]

It's a great book.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you know it? Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Beautiful writing. Yeah, we covered that in the Incomparable a while ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Beautifully written.

[Jason Snell]

Just a beautifully written book. And both of those writers are excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

The readers, yes, their voices are a little too close. It took me a while to realize there were two different women going back and forth. But it's one of those books where it's letters back and forth but in a very interesting sci fi environment. And at first I thought, I don't like it. But it really grows on you. And by the end, it's like, oh, don't end. No.

[Jason Snell]

And it is Amal Elmoltar and Max Gladstone who are both really great writers on their own.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, two writers. I see what you're saying.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's two writers. So it's a really. It's two characters, it's two readers, it's two writers. And it's beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful books I've read. In the last.

[Leo Laporte]

Split the letters. Yeah, it's so beautiful.

[Jason Snell]

I would imagine that they split the letters and then. And then, you know, Cross. Cross worked on the other person's.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of word playing, a lot of cultural references.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it really is beautiful prose. It's good. I'm glad you liked it. If you want to, I'll extend the invitation again. If you want to join the book club, it's gonna. You're welcome to.

[Jason Snell]

I did that for a service model.

[Leo Laporte]

I know you did.

[Jason Snell]

If I'm around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're around. Please. We would love to have you. And of course, all of you would love to have you, but there's a thing you have to do first. Jason's already done it. You have to join the Club Twit. TV Club Twit. There's a two week free trial if you want to do that. There's a. Of course, a single person's plan, but also family plans and enterprise plans. Please join the Club Twit. TV Club Twit. We just want to have you in there. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time. Time for the Vision Pro segment.

[Andy Ihnatko]

What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Take that, apple.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Where do you go?

[Jason Snell]

That's right, it is time once again, ladies and gentlemen, for the number one Vision Pro segment on the number one Vision Pro podcast in the world. And now your host. You know him, you love him. He doesn't like the Vision Pro. It's Leo Lapare.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't say I don't like it. I don't have one. Dan Moran has one. That's story number one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not that he's bitter.

[Jason Snell]

Well, you returned it.

[Leo Laporte]

We bought one for Micah and I tried it and then we sent it back.

[Jason Snell]

And you sent it back.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't see any real needs.

[Jason Snell]

Not unusual in that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think more and more I might be coming around on the Vision Pro. There's, you know, maybe, maybe not it's cool.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, it is. It's for nerds like us. Look, look, I'll just say it one more time, because I always say this. It reminds me of the early days of personal computers, where it's like, it costs what? And it does nothing, but it's the future. I'm like, okay, that's what the Vision Pro feels like every time. I'm constantly searching for reasons to wear it, but once I put it on, you're happy. I don't want to take it off. I want to find more things to do. And my frustration is there isn't more to do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And that's what I think that some developers miss, is that they're like, well, the market's really small. And you're like, okay, but there's a bunch of us that just keep wanting to buy something. Like, we're like, we spent a bunch of money. We're willing to pay for things to.

[Jason Snell]

Tens of people are willing to buy 10.

[Alex Lindsay]

Here's what I think is the hard.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Part is it's hard to know how to get to those folks. You know, like, so there's. There's a 400,000 people, but how do you aggregate them so that you can actually let them know that? Because if someone told me the problem is you go up to the App Store, and there's a lot of stuff there that I already have. I mean, I have. Like, usually in the App Store, almost everything says open because I bought or.

[Jason Snell]

Downloaded all of it.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a lot of Vision Pros on ebay. I wonder, you know, and it's, you know, a thousand bucks less if you buy it on ebay. Do you think a used one. I should probably get it from Apple?

[Jason Snell]

No, I mean, I wouldn't pay full price for it. I mean, yeah, I think that probably those 21.99 on eBay are lightly used, is my guess. They're lightly used.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little dust, a little layer of dust. Dust.

[Jason Snell]

But one of the, you know, one of the rumors is that they're going to refresh it at some point, maybe the end of the year, beginning of next year with the M5. I'm not sure it'll make much difference because it doesn't feel slow in any way at all. It may just be that literally they don't want to, you know, they. They don't want to use the M2 anymore. They're going to stick an M5 in it. But, like, I. I find it interesting, and I think it's a really good operating system and it's just in a product that costs too much and there's nothing enough software for it yet. So it's like every time, look, every time I put on the Vision Pro, I have a good time. My problem is getting a reason to put it on.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, I understand that. I do, I really do.

[Jason Snell]

Shame.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple did. We maybe now know how Apple improved the avatars in the Vision Pro. It turns out in January they bought a 3D avatar company called True Meeting. You think this is the source of the improved avatars?

[Jason Snell]

Could be.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It could be. It could be that it probably isn't their technology. It was probably the people that they brought, you know, have, you know, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, oftentimes it's an Israeli company. They did obtain their 3D avatar tech stack and hired a number of its employees. So it could well have been both. I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

It's. It is remarkable. I mean, this is the story of the Vision Pro is that they didn't just ship it and forget it. Like, remember those initial Personas were creepy and not good and like Dead Eyed Dolls and the new one in 26. It's so good. It's, it's, it's amazing. Like the only thing creepy about it is how they do that, but it's not. It's like coming out of the uncanny valley. So. So if they did buy that company to do that, then kudos to them because the output in vision OS26 is. It's just night and day. Better. It's so much better.

[Leo Laporte]

How many different angles did Dan Moran's wife have to try to get the spooky eyes looking so good?

[Jason Snell]

It's pretty good, right? I think that's the best spooky eye shot I've seen of all. Those are his eyes. It actually looks pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like you're seeing through the vines.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Yeah, right. It's like, it's hard to do. I've never seen what mine look like. Never. Good to dance.

[Alex Lindsay]

You don't want to creep yourself out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no. He says. So this past week I've spent some time mixing it up in a bunch of different places. The beach, the lake, even the desert. The beach, the lake, even the desert, the beach. Are you getting it? These aren't three locations. It's just one. Nice callback, Dan.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So he loves it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, he's having fun playing with it. He's never used it outside of a 30 minute demo. So it's going to be an interesting test case because it's somebody who's Been plopped down with Vision OS26, who's never used the Vision Pro before, essentially, and sort of I'm enjoying his reactions. He texted me today. He's like, Dropbox still doesn't have an app for the Vision Pro. I'm like, I know, I know. It's so frustrating. And it's good to get a sense because I've been sort of taking the slow path, like Alex, where we've been using it since it came out. And it's really fascinating to have somebody who really is up on the tech but hasn't used this particular product. It would be the same as if you, Leo, or you, Andy, or my friend John Syracusa or somebody like that suddenly got handed a Vision Pro and said, here, use this and tell me what you think. It's like, it would be really interesting to find out what a brain that has not been, you know, injected with things in their eyes for 18 months and just as fresh could look at vision OS26 and go, oh, you know, here are the things they noticed that we all nod our heads at. And here are the things they notice we're like, oh, I hadn't really thought about it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So it's funny. And there's always the, hey, you don't have to reach out. Like, when everyone starts up, you're like. You just.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you just keep it subtle. Keep it down here. Yeah, you don't have to. Although there's no cameras pointing backward, I find that I'm trying to do gestures back here. Sometimes I'm like, oh, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't see me back here.

[Jason Snell]

I got to come back up here. But, yeah, it's. It's. I'm glad he did that. That was a. That's a totally random thing. So he'll be writing those for a little while in six colors, a little diary of his things that he's noticed as he. As he uses it. Which is kind of fun to see. A fresh. A fresh take on it.

[Leo Laporte]

I am. I'm going to admit, I'm not hiding this, but I. I don't. I have. I don't have stereo vision, so it's probably never going to be something I like. I did have a meta quest. In fact, I had all the Oculuses right up through the Meta Quest Pro, and I'm able to use them. I mean, I'm able to do it, but it's not completely comfortable for me because I only use. Normally I only use one eye at a time.

[Jason Snell]

Alex was about to say something that I think is relevant here, which is one reason you would choose to use this is because if you are watching, like a movie or a TV show alone, it's great. We did a podcast last week, it's coming out in a couple weeks, about Das Boat, the classic German submarine movie, three hours of submarines. And my wife and I could not coordinate the time to watch that together, so I just watched it myself in Vision Pro on a giant screen. And like, it. It looks so good. Like it is.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It does not grain.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, it's.

[Jason Snell]

It's not pixely or anything. It's like you're watching on a giant movie screen. It is like, again, if you're somebody who watches a lot of movies. Movies by yourself.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. I mean, this is an easy one. If you're. If you're really into movies, it's really easy to do this because there's nothing at home and very few things. Unless you're going to a top of the line Adobe Cinema or an IMAX or an Amazon or an AMC prime, that's about the only thing that is remotely competitive with watching the. You know, watching it on a Vision Pro. If you're by yourself, you know, like, you know, and you learn. Like, this is another thing you learn after a while is you know, how to eat popcorn and you know how to drink things without it going, hey, what do you want me to do there?

[Alex Lindsay]

So.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So those are things that you kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

You.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You slowly learn to do. But I think that it is. It's so enjoyable. And I. I think the difference for me with the. The quest is still that I put the quest on and I go do something on Supernatural or something like that, and I go to do something with the quest on the Vision Pro. When I put it on, I'm like, oh, it's been two hours. Like, I better go do something else. Like, I lost. I lost more time than I expected because I go watch something, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll go watch something like Jason. You lose.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You do lose track of time in there pretty quickly, you know, And I think. I think the hard part is when someone gets a new. When they tell me they have a new headset, I send them, like, you know, get jig space. Get this. Get this. Get. Get the Prima app. Get this app. Get, you know, you know, immersive list. Get, you know, like, I make this, like, a list of things that they should download first so that they understand, like, what the headset can do kind of thing. The one that usually is the one that pops out for people Is Jig is Jib Jigspace. You know, it's the one that like when they see it, they see the possibility of what the product can do from a 3D environment perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's your Vision Pro segment. Oh, I, what? Stop, stop, pause. We're not done. Apparently this entire segment is out of order.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I know, we threw the whole thing out.

[Jason Snell]

Sorry.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I, I, I, it came up so quickly. The one thing that I, I think that people should pay attention to that relates to the headset.

[Leo Laporte]

I really wanted to end it, but I tried.

[Andy Ihnatko]

All I want to say is it's not so much just with the headset but it's related to the headset. Is the Apple spatial audio format is something we should start tracking. Like it is a really like I started, I've been watching the videos from wwc.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that USDZ or is that something else?

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, this is so Apple is kind of weird. I don't know all of it and not all the data is there. So it's one of those things that you see like you saw USDZ pop up in 2015 or 2016 and it's the beginning of something and then you see it keep on growing inside of that. When you see Apple like release something and start talking about it, you kind of want to pay attention to what it's doing. The spatial format basically is, it's a container that is ambisonic based but big. A container that can fit Atmos inside of it. So Atmos sits. Yeah, so think about, it's a, you know, Atmos can fit inside but it can do a lot more than Atmos. So that's the, that's the issue. And what you're, you know, starting to see is that Apple is starting to think about, you know, they don't have, the only place they deal with speakers is the Apple tv really, you know, like, you know, everything else is all your headset and your, and everything else. And so an Ambisonic especially when you do higher order. So there's first and second ambisonic mics but you can compose in third order, fourth order, fifth order of Ambisonics and start to have a lot of resolution of where things are. And if you weren't trying to build beds and just objects and so on and so forth, you could do a lot more. And if you didn't have to worry about being compatible with everybody else, you could do a lot more. And so the thing is that it appears that Apple is thinking pretty hard. And as I said I spent a lot of time Looking through some of the videos in wwc, it's definitely one of those things that I think it's worth starting to track. It's not there yet, but I could see artists starting to release stuff in that. It won't be the. That's the core format. How it's delivered is another format.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the name of it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I believe it's Apple Spatial Audio Format format asap.

[Leo Laporte]

As Apple AF asap. Okay, so we'll look for that. What you're saying is within. You get Dolby Atmos in the headset. So that stuff's above you and below you, behind you.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It can fit it in. Just think of it as a container that can fit. It'll do everything that Atmos can do, but it can do more. It's bigger, it's bigger, it's more detailed, it has a lot more to it. And it's not constrained by. I mean, I mean Atmos right now is arguably one of the best formats to put something in a spatial environment. But imagine a container that is bigger than that environment, that can do more than that environment, but can still do Atmos. Kind of. If you talk to people that work on Atmos, they're like, well, the UP speakers aren't quite right. But now it gets converted. That's their format. It gets converted into the Apple Positional Audio codec, which is another thing, which is what you have to publish to, to go to the Apple Vision Pro. And so, but you can tell as they start to work through this, these two formats are. Or these codecs and these, the format and the codecs are new. There's the tools are, you know, Apple licensed right now and only I think working in logic and resolve right now if you can get ahold of them. But the, But I think that, I think that this is going to be a really. When you start to dig into. Gives you a lot more resolution than what we get with potentially a lot more resolution than what we get with the Atmos format. The Atmos format gives you compatibility with all of these devices all over the world. And that's not something Apple cares about. You know, like, it's like, like if we build something that's, that's got two or three times the resolution and all these other things that you can do. And it only works on Apple platform. On the Apple platform, Apple's like, you know, it's, you know, they, they prefer to have something that they. I don't know. I don't know. I haven't talked to Apple about it. But be they'd prefer to have it that way. And so, but I, I think that it kind of snuck under the radar at WWDC that I didn't pay attention to it until the last couple weeks. And, and it's, it's a pretty, it's, it's worth. If you're a developer, if you have access to those, those, those videos, it's worth watching.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's interesting. Now I'm done.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that all?

[Jason Snell]

That's all I have to say.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we stop it now?

[Jason Snell]

You see, now you know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We're done.

[Jason Snell]

The end.

[Leo Laporte]

Faded out rapidly. Congratulations to. Drumroll please. Mr. Ed Sheeran, the most streamed artist of the last 10 years of Apple Music and YouTube. Oh, YouTube. He went on YouTube.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If you look at the YouTube, if you look at the most streamed track.

[Leo Laporte]

Shape of you is right up there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There's so many. It's not that he has one that's the most, most. Because I think the most is like a, a kids thing with dinosaurs or something. But the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's baby shark probably.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Baby shark, yeah, that's what it is. So, so the sharks are dinosaurs. They're just still alive. Anyway, so the, the, the anyway. But he's got like 10 in the top 20 or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. Eddie Little, Eddie Sheeran.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He's done well for himself. That's all.

[Leo Laporte]

He's done well for himself. We all, we never thought amount to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Anything because he only knew four chords.

[Leo Laporte]

Number one, Shape of youf. Number eight is Perfect. Is number eight on the list. And then I have to keep going down to find more. Anyway, number two is the Weeknd. Okay. Number three is Drake. God's Plan. Are these good songs? Post Malone's Sunflower Number 5. Post Malone's Rockstar Number Number 5. Sorry, Sunflowers Number 4, One Dance featuring Wicked and Kyla by Drake. Number 6. This seems to me just a list of like kind of. I don't know. I won't say anything bad. You used to be a music director. What would you say? Alex Lindsay?

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's all pop. I mean that's what happens. Everyone's listening to pop.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the most popular.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, these are, these are popular songs. A lot of people listen to them. They, they follow the pop charts, so to speak.

[Leo Laporte]

And the pop, the pop formula, one one might say.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, but you know I, there's a lot of people that talk about, oh, there's no good music. And I asked my, my daughter who's much more of an expert on this Than, than I am at this point. And she said it's never been better. Like there's never been really. Yeah. Well, if you dig in, if you are paying attention to, you know, and you're looking because artists can make, anybody can make an album now. Anybody could do a recording. You know, Billie Eilish is doing stuff out of her bedroom, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Have become so accessible. There is so much music and so much variety. It's just that we see all these big ones, we only see these guys, but you're not going to see the ones at the, at the top, you know, it's like podcasts.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean it's, there's, there's, there's, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, there's a lot of great stuff. You know, I may not be number one on Apple's charts, but, but those.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Ones pay for all the other things too, for the record companies. You know, I remember having, I was talking to a lead singer named Mike Edwards who's the lead singer for a band called Jesus Jones back in the day. And I asked him what he thought of Vanilla Ice because, you know, they're on the same label, you know, like it. So I said, what do you think of Vanilla Ice? And he's like, oh, I love Vanilla Ice. He goes, he goes, that's what pays. That's why I'm here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Like, he was just like, you know, like, I'm here because Vanilla Ice pays the bills, you know, and so they're not making any money on Jesus Jones. And so, so I think that, you know, all of this stuff kind of pays for that. But there is a huge. And then there's just all these independent folks that are, that are out there and you have to, you have to look for it a little bit. I don't have to look for it because I have a very knowledgeable 15 year old daughter. So that sends me, has a playlist that keeps me up to date. But, but I think that if you look for it there, and I will agree, there's just incredible amount of good music out there, just not, it's just not streaming a billion streams, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

He started singing in a local church choir at the age of 4. Learned to play the guitar at 11. Began writing songs in high school. A school report described him as a natural performer and his classmates voted him Most Likely Likely to be Famous. Number one on our hit parade. Ed Sheeran.

[Alex Lindsay]

I swear to God, I thought you're doing like the old timey prospector.

[Leo Laporte]

Narrator. I don't do That I don't do the best.

[Alex Lindsay]

Casey.

[Leo Laporte]

Casey. Yeah. Prospector. Ed Sheeran. Number one. F1 is Apple's highest grossing theatrical film ever. $293 million at the global box office, beating Napoleon, which, you know, is not easy to do, as the British learned, but somebody had to do it. F1 has generated 60 million from IMAX theaters alone. That's 20% of the total gross.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Because it's a big screen film. Like, that's why people are going to.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to see it at the IMAX if you can. Look how big that screen is right there. That's a big screen. Looks like the people are real, but the cars are fake in this picture. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Also, they were smart enough to release it ahead of Superman and Fantastic Four.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it might have gotten lost if it were like third in that. In that release calendar.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they learned from. I can't even remember. There was that astronaut movie. There was the one where they're looking down a cliff. Cliff. They learned. They learned from the. The various other movies. There was the one with the cat in the backpack, you know, that one. None of them did so that so well.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So. But F1 did good and they didn't need to make. I mean, it's great that they made money. The big thing is they got a lot of people. Everybody knows that F1 is out, you know, and. And so they'll.

[Leo Laporte]

How did you not know it was in your damn wallet?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Everywhere.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It'll be really interesting for us to look at what happens in, you know, as these contract negotiations go through and whether that turns into any. Any. Whether this leads into much more F1 coverage on. On Apple, because I think that that feels like it's the bigger game than just doing a movie.

[Leo Laporte]

So CNBC says while the film is nearing 300 million in global ticket sales, it still has a few more laps to go get it in order to be profitable for Apple. The Movie costs between 200 and 300 million to make and 100 million market.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And so again, they don't. They don't need to make money on it. Like, the hard part with this, everyone does this old math, like, oh, my gosh, they're going to lose money on it. Like, these streamers are, quote, unquote, losing money on everything they put on the stream instead of putting in the theatrical. Theatrical just takes the edge off, you know, like, it's not. It's a much different business model. And I always think that when people say, oh, they're going to have to. They're not going to make their money back, you know that, that bigger, it's a bigger game than, than, than just trying to make box office. I think it doing well in the box office was important, I think to, to make a splash. But I don't think that, you know, there's many more people are going to watch it on streaming later. You know, I do think that what the streamers really give up is there's so much content being created. You see a little of this in the Apple Vision Pro. There's a little lap that they put on the Apple Vision Pro. But I always feel like the streamers are giving up. They make these movies, they own the movies. They have a place to just throw lots of content. And I cannot believe they don't put more behind the scenes and making ofs and they do a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there'd be so much you could do with this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's like a drop of. And people who are really into it. You know, someone who's really into F1 who watched the movie, got really excited about it, might watch hours of that if it kept on coming out, you know of, of how to do that. And it's. I'm always amazed that they don't put more into it. Some of it has to do with contracts with the. But you're already paying the actors a lot of money. You can pay them a little bit more to have access to that usage.

[Leo Laporte]

Brad Pitt's not cheap. No. Two years in, Apple is officially on threads.

[Alex Lindsay]

Good for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Good for them. I wonder how I'm back, huh? Yeah. Why not? Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean it is an Instagram meta.

[Leo Laporte]

The real question is why are they still on X? The thing is anyone still on X?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's still, it's still the platform with the greatest reach. It's still like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it is.

[Alex Lindsay]

Tim Cook was using. Tim Cook posted just this week about the flooding in Texas, about how Apple is going to be like helping to monetarily support relief efforts down there. And if you want that to reach the greatest audience, it's not going to be blue sky.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's true. Apple's fifth Avenue store was spray painted that beautiful glass structure on Fifth Avenue. An Extinction rebellion protester was arrested after spray painting Tim plus Trump equals toxic and boycott on the glass. Now the good thing is glass is really easy to clean. So I think just, you know, a little razor blade and some elbows gone by the morning.

[Alex Lindsay]

New York City. That glass was Treated to resist worse than spray paint.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point, by the way. This is the post from Extinction rebellion. Oh, they didn't do it on X. No, they did it on Blue Sky.

[Alex Lindsay]

So there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the hippie. That's the hippie platform.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can I say that for freehand? That is very, very good. Like spray paint penmanship.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They hired somebody to protest paint.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, here come the employees. When did the Apple police arrive? Do they have.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're letting them do it. I think most Apple employees are kind of instructed not to do anything. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just. Why don't get involved. Just, you know, we'll take it off in a minute.

[Alex Lindsay]

Especially like, you know, wait for them to get to the part of the performance where they're waiting to be arrested because tackling them to the ground and kicking the spray.

[Leo Laporte]

There they go. There they go. Here they come. Gotcha.

[Alex Lindsay]

Isn't a good visual.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Alex Lindsay]

So they were upset about Tim Cook cozying up to Trump and Trump being so anti environmentalist and so that's where.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the weekend? No, that's not the weekend. I'm sorry. Okay. It's not Ed Sheeran either. Just want you to know, don't get confused by our.

[Alex Lindsay]

I thought they threw.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, they throw soup at artworks. That makes me mad because that's harder to clean up. Don't throw soup at the Mona Lisa. I know it's behind glass. It's okay. This is my favorite story of the week. You can use sous vide. I know. Andy put this in. You can use sous vide to help your iPhone repairs. This is from a Reddit post. Not on the Apple subreddit, but on the RSUVIDE subreddit. Oh, no know, Zizter said 180 degrees Fahrenheit for the iPhone is the SV sous vide sweet spot. He apparently. What is he trying to do? He's trying to loosen the glue.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, he, he. He broke a screen and he didn't have the right tools to like soften the adhesive. So he decided, well, look, the water bath is the, the whole temperature is that it's digitally controlled. Controlled, perfectly held temperature. What if I were to like, you know, put it in a sous vide bag, vacuum seal it so it can't get any water and then. Precisely. Control put. So he put it into like. Yeah, he set it for like 212 and he decided to pull it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's boiling. Don't do that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or something. Yeah, whatever. He pulled it earlier than. Than he wanted. But he said that? Yeah, it came right off. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I have my sous vide handy. He clearly, though, had a seal, a meal, or some sort of professional vacuum sealer. Vacuum sealer. I have one that's suitable for packing an entire deer. I got like an industrial. If you ever need. If you ever need a little vacuum packing, just come on over, I'll put your iPhone in that thing and nobody gonna get into that. That's important because you don't want the water to get into the iPhone. Fun.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's right. Don't do it just in a Ziploc bag and hope that the water doesn't get in because you might be in trouble. Then you want something a little bit more than that sous vide, though. I don't know if I'd endorse this use, but it's great for decrystallizing honey. It's great for thawing. Put it on the lowest setting where there's no heat and you just put water in it and you can thaw frozen stuff in no time. Lots of great sous vide.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're not going to heat it, you could just put it in a bucket.

[Jason Snell]

No, no, no. Because the.

[Leo Laporte]

The act of circulating it.

[Jason Snell]

So other the pro tip is the way you do it is you put it in a bowl under the sink with the sink running very slightly because you need to have the circulation. Otherwise the cold stays right next to it. And it takes forever to thaw by circulating the water. It thaws really fast, which is really great.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jason Snell]

And then you can take it out and marinate it or do whatever and cook it, or you can throw it on the grill or whatever. You can do any of those things, but very nice. So, yes. Yeah, I'm sure this works.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it right if you're going to do it. I love it that he posted this on rs, not on R. Yeah. And won the award for most unusual sous vide cook of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a versatile appliance.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Don'T use it if you're on Chopped because it's not going to cook long enough for you. You got only 30 minutes for the. For the entree round, but if you every other application, it's worth a shirt.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, get ready your picks of the week. Coming up next. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Inako. Is the site up? Andy, is it up?

[Alex Lindsay]

Three more things to write and it's up.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. All right. Three more things and you will be able to go to I H N A T K o dot com. We need a better mnemonic for this. Then. I have no idea how to spell it. What could I have no absolute Kelvin to kill over.

[Jason Snell]

I have no answer to knowing.

[Leo Laporte]

Tomorrow'S oblivious.

[Jason Snell]

Tomorrow's obituaries. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh. I have no answer to knowing tomorrow's obituaries dot com.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have to be honest and say I know some of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, good luck. Congratulations. That's great. Office Hours Global. Mr. Alex Lindsay. What you got coming up?

[Andy Ihnatko]

What do I have coming up?

[Leo Laporte]

We are questions and answers.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We do question and answers. And then when we're done doing the question and answers, we. We do more question and answers. You will see some. We're testing more and more concerts, so stay tuned for more of that. But those are our big things.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Ed Sheeran might need somebody to bring people his amazing music.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'll let you know. I'll let you know. We'll have our people talk to his people.

[Leo Laporte]

Have your people talk to his people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

OfficeHours Global. And on YouTube, it's YouTube.com OfficeHours Global. And Jason sell6colors.com and of course, many a podcast as well @ Jason. Jason sixcallers.com Jason.

[Jason Snell]

Yes, indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

What's your plug? Anything? I decided to move the plugs up in the.

[Jason Snell]

What's my plug this time? Geez. I had a good one too. Well, the last Friday we began the summer of submarines on the incomparable. We are gonna watch submarine movies. Das Bud is coming up. Crimson Tide, October. We already did Hunt for Red October.

[Leo Laporte]

So many great submarine movies.

[Jason Snell]

It's in there. Run silent, Run deep. And we're compiling a list. And so, yeah, submarines. We're going to do a bunch of submarine movies. It's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Gary from Scooter X is an acronym, a mnemonic for an Anatko in harmony. Nature always takes kind order. I bet perplexity could do this. Give me.

[Jason Snell]

I think it's too many letters. I think that's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

For remembering the spelling of Anatko. I wonder. This is just a little way to stall before we get to our picks of the week. Ladies and gentlemen. I have never ate tomato ketchup onions. That's a good one. Okay. I have never ate tomato ketchup.

[Jason Snell]

Ketchup onions. Today we'll attempt a feat once thought impossible.

[Leo Laporte]

Overcoming high interest credit card debt. It requires merely one thing.

[Jason Snell]

A SoFi personal loan.

[Andy Ihnatko]

With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low.

[Leo Laporte]

Fixed rate monthly payment.

[Jason Snell]

Defy high interest debt with a SOFI personal loan.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit sofi.com stuck to learn more. Loans originated by SoFi Bank NA member.

[Jason Snell]

FDIC terms and conditions apply.

[Leo Laporte]

NMLS 696891 I'm going to start my pick of the week because you, you guys made me think, what if I could make that iPad mini be everything I ever wanted in life. So I bought for 40 bucks this arctech keyboard case to take this tiny little lightweight weight iPad mini and turn it into a clunking behemoth that weighs, you know, two pounds. But I gotta say, it's the cutest little keyboard. It's completely functional if you got, you know, little fingers. I decided I'm probably not gonna use this day to day because one of the virtues of the mini is it's so light and you can just, you just hold it and it, you know, it's easy. But on the other hand, and for traveling, maybe this keyboard case will be the right thing. I will let you know. It also has a very nice place to put your pencil, as you can see. So you, you know, and it's a good hard shell case. It is there. Since there is no, you know, special adapter for the keyboard on the mini, it does have to use Bluetooth but you charge it once and it lasts for a long, long time. So I will give credit to Artec and yes, you probably have to buy this one on Amazon because I don't think it's, it's exactly something that our tech is selling directly. That's where, that's where I ended up getting it. Thank you for a kind of a. I think I read this on a review of this, I think maybe on Wired and I thought, oh, I should give it a try. It's got all the right holes, you know, and it's just kind of cute. Put it in your back pocket. Put it in your. You probably could fit it in your cargo shorts. Andy and Ako pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

First of all, Gemini came up with interesting humans never always take kind opinions. Okay, I'm going to have to clip and say that there's some really good ones here.

[Leo Laporte]

There's some really good ones here. I think we have plenty of them.

[Alex Lindsay]

Excellent. So we talked about prime week. Okay, let's talk. Let's not get into consumerism but however I've historic well things anchor, Anchor uses is Amazon's like Dropshipper or whatever uses Amazon for drop shipping. So it's a good chance to like upgrade your power bricks, upgrade your cables, things like that. This year I got something that I kind of had my eye on. It's a really big power bank. It's the an548 power bank. 192 watt hours w. Yes. And it's about the size of a loaf of bread. I didn't bring it in, but it's about the size of a loaf of bread. But the idea is that it can, it can charge.

[Leo Laporte]

How much does it weigh?

[Alex Lindsay]

It weighs about like 15, 16 pounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta be pretty heavy because a lot of lithium. It's pretty hefty.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. And it, but it does have a big carrying handle. It's easy to. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very haulable for all of those watts. It's pretty compact. I mean I'm surprised at how small it is.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And given that it's. It's according to SATS, can charge a MacBook Air 2.9 times, charge an iPad Pro more than three times. IPhone can charge more than seven times. It has a built in like LED lamp and it could keep that going for about 40 hours. I charged it up and it takes only about three or four hours on a 60 watt charger to charge it up fully. It's not like the big cooler sized charger power banks that you sometimes see where it has actual power inverters. You can plug actual AC appliances into it. And that's kind of overkill for what I'm kind of thinking of. The problem is that it is like where I live, there are hurricanes or snowstorms. If we can lose power for a day, sometimes even two days when it's really, really bad. And it's nice to be able to have instead of having like my normal like 20,000 milliamp hour like phone charger chargers or another, I have another one that can charge my MacBook like almost once. It's nice to know that if I am caught in that situation, I don't even have to really care about conserving like my batteries. I can just simply, if I have to do a live stream, I can go off my phone, I can go off my iPad or my MacBook and just go on like you know, yellow it and it'll be perfectly fine as it's, it's, it's, it's a nice happy medium. And also the reason why I decided to get it is because it is a really, really good deal right now. It's nearly, it's normally $150 and it's close to 50% off this week. I think that there's like an auto. If you go to anchor.com and order it directly. There's like a $66 auto applied coupon code. Code. It's good for the next three days so until like the end of this week. Also, as it happened, I had one of those recalled Anchor batteries. So I had a $30, like anchor store gift card. So I got it for like.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you send it back to them or did they tell you how to dispose of it or what?

[Alex Lindsay]

All they require is that you write on it, hey, this has been recalled. Don't use it. Take a picture of it and include it in the like web app that the web form.

[Leo Laporte]

I probably have a few of them. I actually look around. They were exploding, I guess.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, yeah, when you charge them up. They weren't exploding in and of themselves, but yeah, by themselves. As it, as it happened, I'd cleaned out my office just like two or three months earlier and I had this like box of chargers that were, you know, they're like, like 10,000 milliamp hours, 5,000 milliamp hours where it's like they were fine back when, you know, you know, phones were still using Motorola processors, but now they're like, they can. I could actually now take five pictures with my phone after charging it up with this little thing. So I was happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

That thing that I was trying to figure out how to throw away is actually going to net me 30 bucks. Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. I have never attempted to kill once.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. I've never awakened technically knocked out. Thank you. I help newbies avoid technical knowledge. Overlook.

[Jason Snell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are all very appropriate. Maybe put one of those on a rotating banner. Put them all on a rotating banner on your new website. Merch.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no merch IDs. Each one of these is going on a throw pillow.

[Jason Snell]

The problem is you need to know how to spell it to get. I recommend that iniko.com also have some redirects from domains that are missell similar.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes, yes, I do own some.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope nothing is true.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I have sexcolors.com with a U in it for. For the people who spell color with you. Colors just in case.

[Leo Laporte]

Six coulors, the Anchor 548 power bank. And do look when you go. I think Anchor will have them listed on its site. Look and see if you have any of the two anchor devices that are being recalled. I like it. You can just put your do not use on it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's right at the top of the page. There's a product recall link in the top right corner.

[Leo Laporte]

Corner. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it's actually. They actually expanded it. There were like four more that they added.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Alex Lindsay]

Give it a check.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good on. Good on them. That's, you know, I'm proud of them for doing that. They, they. It was, they're not hiding it.

[Alex Lindsay]

It was easy. You didn't. I didn't have to mail anything. Just a week later, I got in the, in the mail. I got a.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Okay, here's this. Here's your 30 coupon code.

[Leo Laporte]

The Anchor power banks. There's several models. The anchor power core 10,000. Oh, I have one of those. Those.

[Jason Snell]

It sounds like we were talking about this on another podcast the other day. These companies must have like product recall insurance or something because it is. Because I bought an air conditioner that was the wire cutter pick for a window air conditioner a couple years ago and it got recalled. And they said, we'll send you a new one if you want. Which I didn't. I've kind of replaced it. They're like, or you can cut the power cord, take a picture of it, and we'll send you money. I'm like, I don't like the waste of that, but I do kind of like getting my money. So for a thing that has apparently generates horrible mold and so you can't use it, it's like, all right, I'll take it to the dump and I'll take it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Everybody likes money. That's why they call it money.

[Jason Snell]

That's why they call it money. Reference acknowledged.

[Alex Lindsay]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm good. This is an Anchor Prime. This one's okay.

[Jason Snell]

I've never attempted to kill once.

[Leo Laporte]

Or if you want to joke about the website, which is also kind of appropriate, it has never appeared to kick off.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's a good one for hurtfulness.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I want to go in that direction. I'm not sure why our listeners would want to go in that direction.

[Jason Snell]

What I find funny is we're talking about a website that I've been reading for the last nine months. It's just that nobody else can see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just us. It's just us. Just us kids.

[Jason Snell]

It exists, folks. It exists.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. It's the real deal. I'd show it to you, but. But then Andy would have to.

[Jason Snell]

It's good. In fact, one of the features. Should I. Can I pre announce this? One of the things. Andy does enormous amount of work in advance of MacBreak weekly in terms of compiling a whole bunch of like, really good, juicy Apple related links for the week. And I said to him back in the midst of time. You know, that would be a good thing to post on your website. And they're awesome. So you will be rewarded when iniko.com launches.

[Leo Laporte]

I should also mention, actually, this is a good opportunity to mention that after every show for the last couple of weeks, you've been doing a recap.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I started. Well, I got all the lights set up, and I actually start. I actually did it one week because I just wanted to test, like, my lights with and set my camera just to shoot some video. And I wound up recapping the show. And then I've realized that, hey, I kind of enjoy using Final Cut Pro. I haven't done that in 10 years. And Gemini can now teach me all the stuff I didn't want to do. So, yeah, there's. I've edited the third one. I don't know. The thing is, usually what I. The reason why I can do it is because usually there's no one who wants to use this room, like, after I'm done right now. There's somebody who's got it, like, literally, like, as soon as I'm done here. So I might have time to record one this week. I might not if I.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's wrap up quickly. And that way we can get you into your. And then you put those on YouTube. But I imagine you'll at some point put them on the I have never attempted to kill once web website.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I have to thank you. Thank you, Jason, because that was a good idea. And also it solved a problem in that I don't like doing those posts was here's an entire story that someone else very well read, wrote, and I'm going to write two or three paragraphs to sort of hoax it. It's very, very nice to say I'm going to. I can add a comment to it and. But simply direct you to there and.

[Leo Laporte]

Send you to the site.

[Jason Snell]

And you'll find, Andy, after the site launches, that you'll. You'll become as. As expert as I am in turning over every cushion to find potential things you could post on your website.

[Leo Laporte]

So content.

[Jason Snell]

I was happy to see that in you.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't come from this.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have so many links in my blue sky. Not blue sky, in my raindrop. That is basically exactly for this purpose. Every 20 to every blue sky, a.

[Leo Laporte]

Little raindrop must fall.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

So two or three weeks times a week, I harvest like. Okay. No, no. Oh, no, that's just for me. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's good.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Snell, pick of the week.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, there's a game that's been kicking around. It's on Apple Arcade. My friend Mike Hurley recommended it on his blog that he started. And I said to my wife, oh, you might like this game. And the fact is we're both playing it all the time now. It's the watermelon game, Suica Game plus. And this is an example where Apple has taken a game that's in the App Store and it's on a bunch of other platforms too, and they built a version of it that is, you know, basically completely covered. You don't have to spend a dime. And it is a great game. It is. This is a game. It has. Tetris is one of my favorite games of all time. This has strong Tetris vibes as well as matching three in a row vibes like Candy Crushes and also games like Threes where you have the escalating numbers that. And you're trying to build them and get them together. All of those things have kind of been mixed together and it's all in the context of. Of smiling Japanese fruits. That's what it is. And you want to get up to the watermelon. You start with cherry, you end up with a watermelon. It's complicated. It's got weird physics because they're all round. So unlike Tetris where they all just kind of drop and they go where they do these things like land on a thing and then slowly roll off and fall down and it changes the dynamics. If you haven't played it, it's worth a go. Especially if you have Apple Arcade. I really like the gameplay of it. The fact that it reminds me of some of my favorite games speaks really well of it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's cool because a game like this, like Candy Crush would be so full of in app purchases and little. And to have an arcade so you could just play it.

[Jason Snell]

For people who don't know, Apple has taken a bunch of games that are in the App Store with in app purchases and stuff like that. And they have this line of games that are in Apple Arcade that are the plus versions. And what that means is it's the same game but there's no in app purchase. Everything is coming covered because you're an Apple Arcade subscriber. And so I haven't played, I don't know what's in the regular game because I've only played the, the Apple Arcade version. But it's really good and it's on Switch and a bunch of other platforms too. So you can go to suicagame.com and see all of them. But I really. It's worth a look if. If games like Tetris or Candy crush or Threes tickle your fancy, because it is kind of a mashup of all three of those, and it's really good and cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Play it right now. This is so exciting. I can't get very excited.

[Jason Snell]

Good iPhone, Gabe. Good on a commute. You know, all of those kind of things. It's that sort of thing. It has a completely bizarre, inscrutable user interface, but you just play it and you're dropping fruits, and you figure it out.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, and.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, and I should say the way it works is you drop the fruits, they merge together, and when the fruits go to the top of the box, you die. That's the end of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, you don't want to do that. So. So this is a little tetrisy. Oh, look, it turned into a giant tomato.

[Jason Snell]

Okay, here's a tomato. We debate what the fruits actually are.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it could be an apple. That could be an apple.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it looks like a tomato to me too. Even though I think it's an apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I think your wife said it was an apple, and that's why you're questioning my authority. Oh, look, if I could get those two oranges to do that.

[Jason Snell]

You got it. She did say it was an apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew it was an orange. That's the kind of thing, you know, adults.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think it goes great. Great. I think it goes cherry to grape. No, cherry to. Oh, where does it go?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, grapes. These little ones are grapes.

[Jason Snell]

Grapes, Great. It's. It's. It's cherry to strawberry to grape. Oh, Tangelo to orange.

[Leo Laporte]

Now what do I do?

[Jason Snell]

And then you're in the melons. You get the yellow melon, the pink melon, the green melon, and then finally the watermelon at the top.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jason Snell]

Play forever.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be doing this for a while. I'll let you just continue on through. Thank you. Suica game plus, it's in arcade. Don't buy it. Just play it in the arcade.

[Jason Snell]

If you've got apple Arcade, just get it down free.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you don't, why don't you have apple arcade? That's crazy. Mr. Alex, Lindsay's next.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So I'll talk about the first product that got us into this company called Turtle av. But we had them on the show last night for extra hours and our evening show because the morning show isn't enough. So we had these guys on because they had one product that I hadn't seen seen before that I definitely needed was. And it's not shipping yet, but I'll explain it. It's called Downtown. It's by Turtle av. And what it does is it actually lets you. This is kind of geeky, but it lets you take. You can take HDMI and push it in. And what it'll do is it'll take. It'll convert it to nine channels in Dante.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a DANTE device, of course.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Or push out. You see these little, these little. Or push out analog out of the side here. So, so if you need to get, if you need to turn your. And this is. If you're doing a. This is really designed around AV installs. So if you're trying to figure out how do I get to all the speakers? And I need an easy way to have hdmi, not just channels embedded, but stuff that's coming in over Atmos. So like your Apple tv. And it'll loop through here, but then once it's in there, it can distribute those out via DANTE or via analog. And as we started to get into it, you know, we realized that they're doing a lot of other things. And so if you look at, you know, you know, if we go back to, you know what the other things that they have here, we suddenly realize they've got lots of DANTE adapters and other ways to control Dante. And it's just a really like, it was a company that I didn't know existed a couple of weeks ago. And I'm just. And so I'm only bringing it up for the.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you're their best customer, the geeky viewer.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That. And we spent an hour with them last night and, and it was just, just curiosity because it's like, how does a company. And I guess they've only been out. They've only. They really have only been a company for about, I think six months or something like that. So they produced a lot of products or maybe they've been a company longer, but the products have become public.

[Leo Laporte]

I think their branding is good because they've got like Tiffany Blue boxes.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's very green or whatever that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's teal or maybe Tiffany blue. It looks like a Tiffany's box with a lot of ports on it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And so, so it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I needed Dante because I. That I would just like to everything to be Dante.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It makes life much easier.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, if I had more than one microphone in the entire house, Dante going.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Between My computers, on my office. Like, you know, like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's. I use it to basically anything I want to connect via audio. You know, I'll have like, I have a speaker over here and I just have the Autonate and also Turtle make these little things that are just XLR Apple routes from an Ethernet. So anytime I want to add something, I just put the XLRs, these little adapters. I just stick it into whatever I need to stick it into. And then I plug in POE Ethernet into it. Now I'm sending. I can now route audio to the. From anywhere to that speaker. So when you get.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do they call it downtown? Is that a common.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I. I don't. I don't know. I don't.

[Jason Snell]

I don't.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We should have asked. I think. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're moving your sound downtown, man.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know that I think it may be sitting on what's called the Brooklyn Chip, which is the. Maybe that. Maybe that is related.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe because the lights are much brighter there. You can forget all your troubles and forget all your cares. It's possible.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. But anyway, so for the. For the geeky folks that we have a lot of people listening and some people are in av. And if I feel like I do a show every day talking about av, if I didn't know that this company existed until two weeks ago, it was worth. It was worth recommending so that people know that, hey, there's a company building really cool pieces of hardware. Wear that.

[Leo Laporte]

It is cool. It's very cool.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't. Yeah, it's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Turtle.turtle AV.com. yeah, go downtown, man. Well, I think that wraps it up. Maybe we'll have one of the next. Guys have to get into the library room. Do you have time to do your.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have time to do my show. My. My after show.

[Leo Laporte]

Your mini show. Yeah. Andy's Mini Mac break. Coming up on E. Online.

[Alex Lindsay]

We'll have. We'll have the guest back on. We'll have the. The lounge with drinks and they'll throw Rose at each other just like.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Andy Cohen.

[Alex Lindsay]

There you go. The other Andy.

[Leo Laporte]

The other Andy. Thank you so much, Andrew. Stay tuned. He has yet to kill once. I have something like that. Anyway, thank you so much, Andrew. All the best. We appreciate it. Alex, Linda, Lindsay, are you still on hiatus with the Gray Matter show or have you started?

[Andy Ihnatko]

We're coming back right at the end of August and so it'll be. We're going to come back up on Substack as Krasny Conversations we'll give people more information. And so that. Yeah, we're relaunching in Substack. I think the first. And of course, I think the first interview, I believe, is with Richard Haas, formerly of Foreign affairs and so talking about stuff. So we're going to jump right into the deep end. But I think that's good for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember going to an airport with you, get on a flight and you're buying a stack of stuff, including Foreign affairs and the Economist. And I thought, man, this guy's smart.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I've been reading Ford affairs since I was 15 years old. I don't know. I don't know how I got into that, because it's. But, yeah. So anyway, so he's. So that'll be starting up, I think. I think our first live record, we're going to start streaming to Substack. That's what I'm starting to test right now on my channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Substack just added video as well. We've been thinking about ourselves.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So do you have to be invited for the Live? I think you need to get something flipped on the back end.

[Leo Laporte]

We were thinking of adding it to our live.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm sure that they would accommodate. Leo, I can have your people talk to their people if you have.

[Leo Laporte]

My people wanted to do it. I think we got stymied because we thought we had to get invited.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We'll talk.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very humble. I'm a humble person. I have not yet killed one once, whatever that is. Now we're gonna make it really hard to remember how to spell Andy's name. I'm sorry, Andrew. Jason Snell. I mentioned six colors dot com. Gotta go there. Gotta do it. Listen to his shows. The incomparable upgrade. All the rest. Thank you, guys. Thanks to all of you who watch and listen every week. We stream the show live every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. Eastern, 1800 UTC. Of course, for the Club Twit folks, they can chat with us inside the Discord. But there's also YouTube for general public. Everybody can watch YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick.com. and I see the chats. I see all the chats unified in there. So please feel free to use any of those platforms and watch live. But you don't have to watch live. In fact, of the time, most people. It's a podcast. Download it after the fact. You could do that from our website, Twitter, TV, MBW. There's a link on that page to our YouTube channel dedicated to the video of MacBreak weekly. Great for sharing clips with friends and family. Best way to watch or listen is to subscribe to the audio or the video feeds in your favorite podcast player. And if they allow reviews, many do podcasts overcast Apple Podcasts. Please leave us a five star review. Let the world know that you listen to the best darn Vision Pro show in the whole wide world.

[Jason Snell]

Number one.

[Leo Laporte]

Number one. Thank you guys. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time. And as I have for the last many, many years assumed the solemn, dignified and yet somehow difficult duty of saying to you, get back to work. Break time is over. Bye Bye. The tech world moves fast and you need to keep up for your business, for your life. The best way to do that TWIT TV on this Week in Tech, I bring together tech's best and brightest minds to help you understand what just happened and prepare for what's happening next. It's your first podcast of the week and the last word in tech. Cybersecurity experts know they can't miss a minute of Security now every week with Steve Gibson. What you don't know could really hurt your business, but there's nothing Steve Gibson doesn't know. Tune in Security now every Wednesday. Every Thursday, industry expert Micah Sargent brings you interviews with tech journalists who make or break the top stories of the week on Tech News Weekly. And if you use Apple products, you won't want to miss the premier Apple podcast, Now in its 20th year, MacBreak Weekly. Then there's Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. They are the best connected journalists covering Microsoft, and every week they bring you their insight and wit on Windows Weekly. Build your tech intelligence week after week with the best in the business. Your seat at Tech's most entertaining and informative table is waiting at TWiT TV. Subscribe now.