MacBreak Weekly 982: Everyday I'm Scrobblin'

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 982: Everyday I'm Scrobblin' – Detailed Summary

Release Date: July 22, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Andy Inatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell

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1. Apple Beta Releases: Developer and Public Betas

The episode kicks off with a discussion about Apple's ongoing beta releases. Jason Snell mentions that he is installing the Developer Beta 4 of macOS 26, speculating it might transition to the public beta soon.

• Jason Snell [00:56]: "Possibly the public beta. We don't know, but I think all signs, unless there's something catastrophic in here that is going to prevent me from restarting."

Leo Laporte expresses eagerness for the public beta release, estimating it could be imminent.

• Leo Laporte [02:47]: "Where is the public beta? We need to get it in July."

The conversation highlights the significance of moving from developer to public betas, emphasizing that public betas represent Apple's confidence in the software's stability for general users.

• Jason Snell [03:26]: "Public beta is a milestone because it is Apple basically saying to anyone who's interested, you can get the new macOS, iOS, iPadOS, it's going to be okay."

Issues commonly encountered in betas are also discussed, such as the Messages app frequently getting stuck.

• Andy Inatko [04:24]: "Restarting your messages app, that's usually the number one thing I see in the beta is messages gets caught up like stuck somewhere..."

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2. Apple’s Legal Actions: The Jonas Prosser Lawsuit

A significant portion of the episode delves into Apple's lawsuit against popular YouTuber Jon Prosser for leaking information about iOS 26.

• Leo Laporte [17:22]: "Apple is suing Prosser for leaking information about iOS 26, accusing him of unauthorized access and trade secret violations."

Details reveal that Prosser allegedly paid an individual, Michael Ramachioti, to access his roommate Ethan Lipnick's iPhone and expose unreleased Apple information. Apple claims this act compromised their trade secrets.

• Jason Snell [19:04]: "It's the inducement. Right. It's the idea that I'm going to... I'm going to pay you to give me the Pentagon Papers versus I'm sitting at my desk and the Pentagon Papers come over the transom. Those are different."

The panel discusses the ethical and legal implications of such actions, stressing the importance of not paying for leaks and the breach of journalistic standards.

• Alex Lindsay [18:48]: "You don’t pay for leaks. And two, you do not entice somebody to do something that is illegal or improper."

The lawsuit is seen as a move by Apple to deter future leaks and enforce stricter security measures among its employees.

• Jason Snell [25:08]: "They really want their employees to be more careful about what they're, you know, whether they gave it to them or talked about it or whatever."

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3. TSMC's Expansion in the United States

The discussion shifts to TSMC's (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) plans to boost chip production in the U.S. This expansion aligns with U.S. initiatives like the CHIPS Act, aiming to reduce dependency on Taiwanese chip manufacturing.

• Leo Laporte [12:00]: "TSMC is working to build two plants in Arizona and they've hit the accelerator pedal."

TSMC's Fab 21 plant will focus on 2 nanometer and more advanced chip capacities, with 30% of their 2nm capacity now planned for Arizona. A second plant targeting 3nm production could be ready by 2028, but accelerated timelines are possible due to global pressures.

• Alex Lindsay [13:04]: "That's a big deal."

The panel underscores the strategic importance of diversifying chip manufacturing to mitigate risks associated with geopolitical tensions, especially concerning Taiwan.

• Jason Snell [16:46]: "This means that all the Eggs aren't in the factories in Taiwan in case something happens in Taiwan."

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4. Encryption and Surveillance Lawsuits in the UK and Canada

The conversation highlights ongoing global debates around encryption, particularly in the UK and Canada.

• Leo Laporte [41:52]: "The UK has backed down from demanding Apple to provide clear text from messages."

Under pressure from tariffs and privacy concerns, the UK government is seeking a resolution with Apple over secure customer data access without compromising encryption standards.

• Alex Lindsay [43:59]: "Canada is now looking at a new bill that would in fact do the same thing. Encryption is under attack everywhere."

The potential Bill C2 in Canada aims to expand surveillance powers, potentially undermining end-to-end encryption and raising privacy concerns among users.

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5. Unicode Consortium and New Emoji Releases

New emojis are a topic of lighter discussion, focusing on their cultural significance and the process of their incorporation into iOS 26.

• Leo Laporte [45:54]: "There are new emojis in the iOS 26 beta. You're getting a Bigfoot, a trombone, a killer whale, and more."

The Unicode Consortium proposed these emojis, which Apple plans to integrate post-September, ensuring that their unique artistic interpretations are reflected across platforms.

• Jason Snell [48:27]: "Every platform can make its own art."

The panel appreciates the diversity and creativity that new emojis bring, even discussing their practical applications in daily communication.

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6. Rumors and Speculations: iPhone 17 Colors and Foldable Phones

Speculations about the iPhone 17's new color options and the potential release of a foldable iPhone take center stage.

• Alex Lindsay [98:39]: "Apple is rumored to introduce an orange, white, black, and dark blue color for the iPhone 17, potentially with a special design related to iOS 26’s liquid glass."

The foldable iPhone is a hot topic, with comparisons drawn to Samsung’s foldable models. The panel anticipates that Apple will leverage its unique hardware and software integration to create a foldable device that stands out in the market.

• Jason Snell [80:57]: "Apple is going to make the iPhone thin enough that we can... fold it up into a foldable the following year."

Concerns about durability and user experience are addressed, emphasizing that Apple aims to perfect the foldable technology before a mass release.

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7. Apple's Vision Pro and AI Developments

The episode touches upon Apple’s advancements in AI, particularly the Vision Pro headset, though with limited concrete updates.

• Jason Snell [66:15]: "Apple has published an intelligence foundation language models tech report aimed at optimizing AI for on-device performance."

The departure of key AI researchers, such as Ruming Pang and Tom Gunter, to competitors like Meta raises concerns about Apple losing ground in the AI talent war.

• Leo Laporte [78:38]: "Apple is losing ground in the AI talent war, with key figures moving to Meta for substantial compensation."

Despite these challenges, the panel remains optimistic about Apple's unique position in integrating both hardware and software for AI advancements.

• Jason Snell [72:23]: "Apple has a unique leverage that no one else has, potentially allowing them to organically develop integrated AI solutions."

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8. Community Engagement and Club Twit Highlights

The panel promotes Club Twit, a membership program offering exclusive content, events, and ad-free experiences to supporters.

• Leo Laporte [112:XX]: "Club Twit pays now 25% of our operating costs and offers members exclusive benefits like ad-free shows and special events."

Members discuss upcoming events, such as Office Hours Global, Stacy's Book Club, and specialized AI user groups, emphasizing the community-driven nature of their platform.

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9. Miscellaneous Topics

Various other topics are briefly touched upon, including:

• Keyboard Innovations: Discussion about bespoke keyboards inspired by shows like Ted Lasso, highlighting the blend of functionality and aesthetics.

• Digital Privacy: Emphasis on the importance of privacy measures and secure device usage, resonating with the broader themes of encryption and data protection.

• Fun Segments: Light-hearted conversations about emoji games, album listening experiences, and the shortening of Earth's day, adding a playful tone to the episode.

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Notable Quotes

• Jason Snell [03:26]: "Public beta is a milestone because it is Apple basically saying to anyone who's interested, you can get the new macOS, iOS, iPadOS, it's going to be okay."

• Alex Lindsay [18:48]: "You don’t pay for leaks. And two, you do not entice somebody to do something that is illegal or improper."

• Jason Snell [16:46]: "This means that all the Eggs aren't in the factories in Taiwan in case something happens in Taiwan."

• Leo Laporte [45:54]: "There are new emojis in the iOS 26 beta. You're getting a Bigfoot, a trombone, a killer whale, and more."

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Conclusion

MacBreak Weekly Episode 982 offers a comprehensive look into the latest Apple developments, industry shifts, and community interactions. From the anticipation of new betas and legal battles to the strategic moves of TSMC and the evolving landscape of digital privacy, the panel provides insightful commentary on the ever-changing tech world. Additionally, lighter segments on emoji updates and keyboard innovations add a balanced mix of serious analysis and engaging discussion, catering to both tech enthusiasts and casual listeners alike.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are here. The whole gang's in town. We're going to talk about the public beta. Where is it? I want to use it. We think it's close. We'll also talk about rumors about a new color for the iPhone 17 and why the foldable might be the thing. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 982, recorded Tuesday, July 22, 2025. Every day I'm scrabbling. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news. And yes, we're a little late, but that's so we could cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is installing the developer beta 4 of Mac OS 26.

[Jason Snell]

Possibly the public beta. We don't know, but I think all signs, unless there's something catastrophic in here that is going to prevent me from restarting. Yeah, I think so. I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

Give us an alert. Can you have a. One of those air horns?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I could do that. I've got a little button that makes that sound. So when we're up and running, I'll let you know. But in the meantime, I am using an auxiliary computer to be on the show, so it's good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

An auxiliary computer? Apple II.

[Jason Snell]

Fancy man has two computers.

[Leo Laporte]

He has more than one. He [e-mail]. Yes, hello. Also here, Andy Inotko from I have no idea how to spell it.com. hello, Andrew.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hey there. Hey there. Ho there.

[Leo Laporte]

All in black. That means it's cooling off in northern New England. Yes, Southern New England only.

[Alex Lindsay]

Wait, we have a double. It's. It's kind of funny because they overcompensate the library. I don't know if they have an old, like, zone system. So, like, the reference librarians are literally wearing sweaters because the AC in their zone is so high. So it's weird to come up off the street, like, wow, and then see someone who's, like, ready for polar excursions.

[Leo Laporte]

So you look comfortable. That's the main thing. You're comfortable. That's the main thing. And Mr. Alexander Lindsay from Office Hours Global. Hello. Hello.

[Jason Snell]

Hello.

[Andy Inatko]

Good. I'm back. Back from the travels.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, back in the studio.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I guess.

[Jason Snell]

We are.

[Alex Lindsay]

Are y' all ready for this? We're really excited.

[Jason Snell]

So this is. I mean, it's exciting because this may be it. This may be the public beta as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

All right, hold your applause, everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

And I believe that was the first question I had is where the hell is the public beta? We, yeah, we got to get it in July. And as if my calculations are correct, that gives us eight more days, nine more days.

[Jason Snell]

You know, I think, I suspect that. Okay, we'll do this. We pretty much know that Apple wants to release a developer beta before the.

[Leo Laporte]

Public beta Late airhorn. I apologize.

[Jason Snell]

You say it and it happens because it's best practices, because what you want to do is make sure that there isn't a real showstopper.

[Leo Laporte]

So the fact that you're getting a new developer beta, Developer four, it would.

[Jason Snell]

Suggest to me that maybe there was something in Developer Beta 3 that they had to talk about. And we're like, we don't want to go out with that. And who knows what, whether that was a. Something cosmetic or whether it was something very technical. But the fact that we've got another set, they only said by July and so suggested it might be as early as the 23rd, which is as we're recording this tomorrow. And it could be that that's only a day for the early for the beta astronauts to try it out and see if it explodes or not. But of course, the people inside Apple are also testing these builds. So anyway, that we are on the cusp of that. And I mean, I realize a lot of our viewership is so technical already that they're probably already running the dev betas, but I think that, I think public beta is a milestone because it is Apple basically saying to anyone who's interested, you can get the new macOS, iOS, iPadOS, it's going to be okay. And the dev betas don't say that dev betas are. You're taking your life into your own hands. But public beta, this is, you know, this is Apple saying, yeah, you go ahead if you are curious about how this is going, there are going to be some bugs, but, like, they're opening the floodgates. So I think it is a real. It's not the same milestone as shipping, but it's a. It's a big milestone.

[Andy Inatko]

Restarting your messages app, that's usually the number one thing I see in the beta is messages gets caught up like stuck somewhere and you're like, oh, I'll just restart.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, there's often icloud, it gets confused.

[Alex Lindsay]

Usually the dev beta is the first time you find out if that app that you love and rely on that hasn't been updated in three years is still going to work or not. That's usually the cost of switching over to the dev beta, the first public beta.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Dr. Do in our club, Twit Discord has posted his screenshot of ipados 26 beta 4 ready to go. But note its size. 1.51 gigs. That's small.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean, they do diff. They do diff betas.

[Leo Laporte]

So it might not be a big.

[Jason Snell]

Shift from beta 3 is, I guess, my cursory. I was looking at iPad earlier, right before we started recording, and it doesn't appear that different. Which, as a writer who takes screenshots of this stuff, I love to see that because you take a bunch of screenshots illustrating features of the beta and then they change the UI and you're like, oh, more work for me then. And this does not seem like they made any big radical changes, but I don't know. It's early yet. We're only, I think, about an hour as we're recording into these betas being available. So people are still kind of figuring it out.

[Leo Laporte]

So would you say I. I'm sitting here wondering, should I. No, I haven't done any of the developer betas. Wait till the public beta, which could be sometime this week.

[Jason Snell]

And if we're talking about, like, I am wary, but I'm tempted by the public beta, which is a great phrase.

[Leo Laporte]

That's me.

[Jason Snell]

That's that squeeze on public beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Curious.

[Jason Snell]

I think. I. I'm always the guy who's like, be careful and back up your stuff and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I will tell you, I have been using all of it since dev beta 1 and it. It works fine for me. I dread putting betas on my iPad and my Mac because I use those so much. I will say, the iPhone betas, it's going to kill your battery life. I mean, it is if you really.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the last thing they optimize.

[Jason Snell]

If you're not carrying around a battery all day, or maybe even if you are like, it shoots your battery life, it makes your phone hot and it shoots your battery life. But, like, my iPad experience has been great on the beta, even with all the changes they made with all the. The windowing and all of that, it works great. I haven't had any major issues.

[Andy Inatko]

Feature.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, Every now and then I restarted or it. The Windows server crashes and you open it back up, you unlock it again, and then it's fine again. I would say entirely usable. And on the Mac, not only would I say that it's very usable and you can. We can quibble about, like, what the interface looks like, because the interface is a little different and weird. But there's so many productivity benefits on the Mac with the new stuff that's in Spotlight and the new stuff in Shortcuts and some of the stuff they're doing in the menu bar that I feel like if you're a power user, it's probably worth doing the public beta just because even if things are a little bit weird, it's usable and it's a great Tahoe is going to be a great update for longtime Mac users. It really is, because they, they. I mean, it's funny, like, they did all these visual changes that feel more like they belong on iOS than they do on the Mac. On the Mac, it's a little awkward, but on the productivity side, the Mac comes out way ahead in this cycle.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Dr. Do says it is a 10 gigabyte update for his iPhone, so a little larger, 3 gigabytes for Mac OS. I don't know. I mean, I'm. We're reading tea leaves at this point, so I'm just going to stop there and say maybe we should wait and see and I will download it. I was hoping to do it by this. By today, you know, because that would seem like. But maybe by next week.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think. I think so. I mean, there's no public beta yet, but assuming it comes out tomorrow, you could take your time, see how everybody's reacting to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Always will. Wait.

[Jason Snell]

Report back next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex, Lindsay's rule. I like your rule, Alex, which is don't update the first. Don't download the first update to the release. Download the update that fixes the first update to the release.

[Jason Snell]

I thought Alex's rule was. Okay, everybody, it's now safe to download Sequoia.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all I was going to say.

[Andy Inatko]

Alex, is the Lindsay's rule. I was like, sometime this summer, I think I'm going to fix Sequoia.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

So I, Yeah, like, like, it's, it's. I'm. I'm getting ready to move forward, you know, so. But now that the, the dust is settled on that one. But I, I think that on a couple of. I'm already starting to put the beta on, mostly because I need it for some again. The other side of this is that I have software that only works on the newest, though, so you have a handful of computers that need to go up, so we're seeing a little bit of both. But I still have a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Machines on some on Monday, apparently, according to MacRumors, Apple accidentally pushed The Tahoe public beta to some users and then yanked it back.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, and it was weird, too. Cause it was like a certain. It was like people without Rosetta installed that. Got it. I don't know. I think they're. Yeah, I think they're loading the chambers here. Right. Like, I think. But that doesn't necessarily mean it'll.

[Leo Laporte]

Which could be. It could be Russian roulette. You know, you don't. Depends which chambers they load or fly.

[Jason Snell]

I've been watching too many submarine movies and like everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

We're filling the, you know, filling the torpedo tubes.

[Jason Snell]

Tubes, Exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

But. But that doesn't mean that if there isn't a Showstopper, they will pull back, because they will not. If they are not confident in the public beta, they won't release it. And that will go for the rest of this period. Like, the public beta trails the developer beta for a reason, which on the developer are the ones who are going to get burned if there's a showstopper. And that's. That's the price we take for being on that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Don't be in a hurry. Everything will happen in its time. In all in good time.

[Jason Snell]

And if you're like, Alex, especially, like, I mean, being careful, if you've got an. A second phone around, if you've got a. Another iPad around or one that's a device that's mission critical and one that's not. I mean, the prudent thing to do if you've got a desktop that you do all your work on and a laptop that you just mess around on, install macOS on the laptop. Right. Like, do that. That's a nice, safe way to approach this where you get to try it out without risking breaking your stuff.

[Andy Inatko]

And the funny thing is, for me, I'm super aggressive about my iPad and my phone. Like, I'm like, you know, I just. Newest stuff just kind of plow through that. It's my work computer that I'm kind of like, well, I'll be really bummed if something.

[Jason Snell]

Priorities.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. There's an obvious hierarchy here. There's like, I've got like the dev betas on my. On my iPhone, which is a secondary phone. I'm not going to install the. I'm not going to install anything on my iPad until the first public beta. I'm excited. I'm going to jump the gun there because of all the extra features. And I'm not installing anything on the MacBook until it's actual golden Master. So it's like, that's the. I can do without this for an entire year if I had to. I can do without the iPad or reduce performance for a few weeks maybe before it become annoying, but I can. No, no. My MacBook is my MacBook.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm just. I don't know if I should repeat this, but I. The discord is telling me that Ozzy Osbourne just passed. I just thought I'd pass that along. I know. Just did his last performance last week. Of course, suffering from Parkinson's. The man who invented heavy metal. There's a very good documentary on him on YouTube, which is available for free on YouTube. I highly recommend. All right, we'll move on. Just thought I'd mention that. Let's talk. There's so many little tiny stories. For instance, tsmc, which makes Apple's Apple silicon in Taiwan, says US chip production may soon only be three years behind Taiwan. This is something Apple and the president have been pushing really hard for. Not just the current president, but the previous president President with the CHIPS Act. They really want Apple to move its chip production back to the U.S. tSMC is working to build two plants in Arizona and they've hit the accelerator pedal. Fab 21, which we had thought would be making legacy nodes, will be accelerated by several quarters. Not clear after completion. TSMC chairman CCweis said 30% of our 2 nanometer and more advanced chip capacity will be located in Arizona. That's a big deal.

[Alex Lindsay]

Are they talking about actual production capacity or.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, 30% of the 2 nanometer is production level. Right. 5% or 1% wouldn't be, but 30%. So almost a third of their highest end chips. The second Arizona plant, he said, or it was said, was ready for 3 nanometer by 2028. But they're, they're accelerating it, which makes sense given the global situation.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, and these are all great press releases too. I mean, well, that's the problem. We can say all this stuff and no one's going to remember that you said it now. Like you're going to get to 2026 or 2027 and. Well, we're still working on it. There's a couple little things or whatever. So. But I think that even if, if they, I mean, at this point, when you look at the cost of the tariffs, if there's a way to push the tariffs off or their way to push some of the regular, some of those things off, even if it cost you a billion dollars, literally, it's worth it put a billion dollars into the ground for and unsuccessfully, and it would be cheaper than paying for the, for the, the tariffs and so for all of us. So, so I think that, so that they can try really hard here. It doesn' great if they're, if they actually succeed. But even if they didn't succeed, it would, it would delay, you know, other things that would be more expensive. It's just, this is just a math, math problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just checking to see where the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin that was going to be built in 2017 is. Have they broken ground? Maybe.

[Andy Inatko]

They made a big slab? Yeah, huge slab.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's, that's, I mean, that's, that's the problem. Like this is coming from a story that, that appeared in Nikkei and it's just thin on actual details. Like that could mean they thought they'd get, that they thought they'd get the land cleared a year after where it is right now. But boy, that land is cleared. That doesn't necessarily mean that like they are, they are that much closer to actually getting chips ready. I keep wondering exactly what the long range strategy is. Is TSMC actually thinking, it actually makes perfect financial sense for us to, now that we have this, now that we have this extra like stick added to the stick and carrot, it makes sense for us to actually do a lot more manufacturing in the United States or is it okay, we are betting that these tariffs and these other conditions are going to persist and that there isn't going to be a turnaround that will make us glad that we didn't actually start. We didn't actually irreversibly commit to this before we actually had to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So we'll just watch with interest. But, but I can see why there's a lot of incentive to do it, to get it, to rush it along as fast as they possibly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, because it's not just tariffs, it's, it's, it's having lots of customers the United States and being able to consider their needs.

[Jason Snell]

And I mean, we talked about this, about Apple and China and trying to redistribute some of its before the Trump administration to redistribute some of its manufacturing to other countries and using the, you know, they used Covid as an excuse and all of that. But this is, this is that double thing where it's not just because the Trump administration and really before them, the Biden administration and Congress with the CHIPS act wanted more chip infrastructure in the US because the failure of intel is really kind of hosed the American chip industry. Right. So this does though, also mean that all the Eggs aren't in the factories in Taiwan in case something happens in Taiwan. I mean that's the bottom line and nobody wants that to happen. But it is important to spread the chip capacity around the world and not just have it in one little island.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Jon Prosser is being Sued by Apple YouTuber and famous Apple leaker. Earlier this year he shared videos of iOS. It wasn't even named iOS 26 yet, but he showed what it was to look like, Apple says and he denies. I should point out that Prosser paid somebody, a guy named Michael Ramachioti to when his roommate was away. His roommate worked for Apple. Ethan Lipnick, when his roommate was away, unlock his roommate's phone, I guess do a FaceTime call with a Prosser and show him what was running on the Apple owned iPhone. According to the lawsuit, they planned access to Lipnick's phone, first acquiring his password, then using location tracking to determine when he'd be gone for enough time for them to do this. And of course the journalistic sin, if it really happened, would be offering Ramachothi money for this. Lipnick was fired. Apple fired him. Apple says his phone contained a, quote, a significant amount of additional Apple trade secret information that has not yet been publicly disclosed. Yeah, Apple filed the lawsuit to request an injunction against further disclosure. Prosser says that's not how things went down on my end. Looking forward to being able to speak to Apple about it. Well, I think you will be, I think you will be speaking to Apple. So we don't know what the truth of it is, but it's a big deal for Apple to sue a leaker. On the other hand, if they Prosser did what Apple says he did, it is crossing the journalistic. It's a beyond the pale, yes. Journalists, yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

Unquestionably, yes. There are two things. If the allegations are true, there are two things that you're not supposed to do. One is pay for this kind of information. Two is entice somebody to break rules or break the law in order to get you information. The only really if they come in.

[Leo Laporte]

Over the transom, you can use it.

[Alex Lindsay]

This would be completely clean. If somebody said, hey, I've got a screen capture of what Apple's next UI is and they just would you like to see it?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That happens all the time.

[Alex Lindsay]

That happens all the time. Then you have the problem of okay, well why should I trust you? Why should I believe this is authentic? A, B, C, D. But the biggest risk is that you're going to look really stupid when it turns out that you fell for something, but that would be completely legal. There are gray areas in between. But no, you don't pay for. You don't pay for leaks. And two, you do not entice somebody to do something that is illegal or improper.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that was in the journalism school. We had to take a law class, your First Amendment law. And one of the top ones is inducement to breaking laws is not cool. So the idea that you are paying for sources is not general. I mean, there are other parts of the world where that is more common, but it's the inducement. Right. It's the idea that I'm going to. I want you to do this for me. It's. It's saying, hey, somebody in government, I want you. I will pay you to give me the Pentagon Papers versus I'm sitting at my desk and the Pentagon Papers come over the transom. Those are. Those are different. And if you, if you want to boil it down, I, I don't like to see big tech companies suing people in the media because I think the point of this lawsuit is to scare people at Apple and to scare people who write about Apple. I think that that's why they do this, is remind their employees about hygiene for carrying, you know, alphas of unreleased and unannounced products on their person or at their house and being, you know, kind of sloppy about that. And also for people who want to report about secrets of Apple to make them a little more scared, I think that's absolutely why they're doing it. But if you boil it down. So, you know, and I don't love Prosser, and I don't like his shtick, and I don't like his tone and all that, but whatever, he has an audience and it's fine. And this was a big scoop. But, like, if the way this story went down is that Prosser said, hey, I'll give you money if you break into your friend's phone. I mean, the act, again, I'm not a lawyer, but, like, it feels like the friend committed a criminal act. I don't know if Jon Prosser did or not. It depends on what the law is. But unauthorized access to someone else's device is essentially, it's computer hacking, right? It is. It is a crime. It's got to be a crime of some.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, they are. They are suing him with the Computer Fraud Act, Right? As.

[Jason Snell]

But I wonder about criminal charges as well, if they don't see any criminal.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a civil suit.

[Jason Snell]

This is a civil suit. But I also wonder if you, you bandy about the criminal charges in order to get people to respond to your other litigation. But yeah, it's not. That's like Andy said, it's not great. Especially if you think about the fact that this was not his phone. It was his friend, roommate, whatever phone. And he was enticed. Was he enticed to break into it in order to reveal secrets? It's not good.

[Andy Inatko]

Also, if you were trying to protect your friend with all the, your roommate with the information, you'd say, well, when he was gone, we had somebody else break into his phone when maybe he just opened his phone.

[Jason Snell]

That's also possible.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like, well, they had wasted no time firing Lipnick. Lipnick also apparently did not inform them once he realized what had happened.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, they were informed by an anonymous email. Here's a. So from the.

[Jason Snell]

This is my favorite. This is my favorite tidbit in the entire thing because somebody emailed Apple and said, hey, Jon Prosser showed me a video of your next operating system, and I recognized that it's Lipnick's apartment.

[Leo Laporte]

Apartment.

[Jason Snell]

What. How do they. How what?

[Alex Lindsay]

Somebody who knows him, who has been to the apartment, ratted him out.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or probably another Apple employee. Right? I mean.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but why do they, why is Jon Prosser showing. I mean, one possible way is that Jon Prosser has Apple sources where he's like, look, you didn't give this to me, but can you, can you show me that this is legit? And they might say yes or no, but they might also be like, oh, that's Lipnick. I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to turn him in. I don't know. We don't know everything. There's a lot of question marks here. Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

Nobody at Apple wants to be near somebody who's leaking. Like, it's, it is like, you're, like, you're, you're now visionable. Like. And you know what's interesting? When you, if you know anybody at Apple, they're all, they're kind of willfully not interested in anything they're not working on because they don't want to be. They don't want to have information. They don't want to have random information that's going to get them in trouble. That isn't helping them move forward.

[Leo Laporte]

Tweet also isn't exactly a denial. It's a kind of an he says it didn't go down that way.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, I think if I was looking at this, if I was A prosecutor, I'd be looking at it going, okay, here's the deal. The guy had his roommate show him the, the, the information. They, they, they traded notes, he posted it, and then they made up something that said that somebody else broke into something else. I mean, like, that's the, that's the simplest line here. Not, not the, the complicated thing that when he also go down this way.

[Leo Laporte]

It probably didn't go down that Apple Security interviewed Ramachati.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. You think?

[Leo Laporte]

And, yeah. And in the interview, Ramachari admitted what happened, said Prosser had proposed the scheme and, quote, promised to find out a way for me to get payment. But this is solely the testimony of this other guy. So Apple's real interest, I think, is the injunction. They don't want, if there is more information, they don't want that to leak out. Apple fears it says in the pleading that defendants will continue to misude its trade secret absent judicial information. So that's really what the lawsuit is all about. And they do say they, you know, defend Trade Secrets Act, DTSA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse act cfaa. The court has jurisdiction under these federal laws. So. Rama Chaudhy is a product analyst and video editor at ntftw. I don't know who that is.

[Alex Lindsay]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I think that the truth may or may not come out on this one. It's, it's a pretty ugly thing all.

[Jason Snell]

Around it, and it doesn't matter because, you know, I mean, yeah, they're going to argue for legal reasons that there's potential future harm that needs to be enjoined here, but like I said earlier, they did this to scare Apple employees.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's clear.

[Jason Snell]

And they did this to scare people who report leaks about Apple. That's why they did it. And job done.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think I absolutely agree on the first point because there's never any reason for them to overlook an excuse to once again drill into these people's heads that we do not take this lightly. We believe this to be a sin against not just our rules, but our culture. And so we investigate. We have people who will figure these things out. I do think it's more, less of a warning of journalists in general, general, so long. More, More of a. Just to look. More just to saying, look, this is not the Wild West. If you cross a line, we will jump on you. There's, there's been lots of leaks over the years that have gone without lawsuits, without legal action, just again, some very, very public firings and even some comments from Tim Cook to the, to the to the masses that has gone leaked out, of course. But I don't think that they're trying to say, look, if you, if you, if you get some aligned to some good information that we haven't published yet. We're not trying to intimidate they' trying to intimidate people into not publishing it. They would love it if they didn't. But so long. Don't pay people to, don't pay people for the information. Don't entice people to break Apple rules or worse the law to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

They do say in this suit, as a direct and proximate result of defendant's conduct, Apple has suffered and continues to suffer monetary and non monetary injury and harm in an amount to be proven at trial. I don't think he's going to get billions from Prosser. But these include Apple's lost profits from the unauthorized disclosure of its trade secret information, its investigation costs, its attorney fees and other costs and expenses.

[Jason Snell]

I wish them luck proving that there's actual damage in leaking some information in advance. I think Apple having to prove somehow I'd love to see the prizes have a tangible value, but it doesn't. I mean the reason I say that it's about, about a chilling effect is it serves as a reminder to employees to tighten up their stuff and to people who report about the company to not do stuff like buy, you know, induce people to break into phones. Like these are good reminders you can do by filing a lawsuit.

[Leo Laporte]

They say they lost at least $5,000, that's sure.

[Andy Inatko]

But I mean the issue is, is that, is that if he, especially if there's any chance that he could get into a, you know, he has to lawyer up if there's any chance that, that he's going to go into a criminal lawsuit. You can't just go into a civil lawsuit without really having the best lawyers because the advantage of the civil lawsuit is there's no fifth amendment. So, so you can just ask lots of questions.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Inatko]

And they can't defend themselves and the.

[Leo Laporte]

Standards for proof are lower as well. Right.

[Andy Inatko]

And have reasonable, that's all admissible in your criminal case. You know, so, so the issue if, if, so as long as there's not a criminal case hanging over you, there's not, there's no way for you to protect yourself. And so the thing is, is that they, so they can, you know, dig into that, but the bot defending himself is going to be 50 to $100,000. Like, like just, just at least, you know, stay out of the hole. Starts. That's the. So, you know, they're not going to. If and if they somehow get him to pay their legal fees, even if they don't do anything else, if Apple just says, you have to pay our legal fees for that as well, he's. He's going to be half a million dollars in the hole without any, without any, you know, without any damages, you know, in beyond that.

[Alex Lindsay]

And, and I mean, as a, as a son of a lawyer, you might have a better insight into this than anybody else, but it's certainly not a slap suit. Okay? It's not. We're going to. We're going to. We're not, we're not. We're not suing him just to basically make him have to spend money to defend it. But even so, Even so, defending against this suit has got to cost us.

[Andy Inatko]

A lot of money.

[Alex Lindsay]

Do you think, do you think that Apple is going to simply say, at some point, say, pay a certain fine that we think is. Admit wrongdoing. Send no. Send no more. Pay a certain fine that we will re. We will regard as the photocopying charges for this and we'll let you off? Or is it going to be, no, we're going to go for everything.

[Andy Inatko]

Settlements happen a lot. Like, hey, if most of you do this again, and it does it, you know, because taking it to court is, you know, it's unpredictable as well. Even no matter what you do, once you go to court, you don't know what's going to happen. Open, like, you know, like a lot of, you know, the best team in the football, the worst team in football can always beat the best team in football. And so, so, you know, like in, in, in. In the right. With the right circumstances, same thing with a law case, you know, so you don't want to take it to court, so there could be some kind of settlement that, that, that he's going to be out some money. But I think what they really wanted to do is stop doing that. And to the end, to Jason's point, they really want their employees to be more careful about what they're, you know, whether they gave it to them or talked about it or whatever, you know, and what happens is, I think that Apple doesn't want to. They don't want to be seen as the bad person. So if you're in the gray area of you had a loose conversation, you're not going to get yourself, you know, sued. But as soon as you step a little bit past that gray area, into an area where there's A clear shot they're going to, they're going to go after you because it makes them crazy. Like it makes every company crazy when people are sharing what they're trying to work on.

[Leo Laporte]

Makes Apple crazier than anybody, of course, because they're.

[Andy Inatko]

Admittedly, Apple oftentimes is way ahead of everybody else and they don't want other people thinking about those things until they've done the thing right.

[Leo Laporte]

But really, I mean, did they really get harmed by what Prosser published? No, I don't think so.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, that's why if they do go forward with this, I would love to see, assuming that Prosser's lawyers are good and they're funded enough to actually, like, fight this, I would love to see the discovery process, hey, Apple, calculate for us and show us documentation of how you value certain bits of information and how you monetize different features. I don't think that Apple's going to be interested in that part of the process at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus, it sounds like this all hinges on Ramachody's testimony. Like that's who said Prosser paid me. There's probably. Unless there's a check, unless there's a large payment going into his bank account.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, it puts the screws to Prosser a little bit more to get him to agree. I mean, the classic example here is the Think Secret suit that they did like 15, 20 years ago where there was a website that Apple sued and basically as part of the settlement, that website shut down. And that guy said, I will never do this again. And he disappeared. And that, that will probably be the case here. I will say for people who are wondering, like I talk to people at Apple, people have rogue, you know, future OSes on devices at home all the time. This is common. And it's not like he secreted this thing out of Apple. Apple. It's common. And there is a device hygiene kind of thing you need to do. And what happened here is it was somebody with access to the guy's house who knew his passcode. And, and that's the reminder to Apple employees is not, you know, don't be a leaker, although I guess that's implied. But it's, it's that sort of tighten up your own security that like, you don't show this to your friends, you don't let your friends know your passcode. You use a different passcode on this stuff. And if you can't secure it, don't take it home. But, but they do take it home and that's, that's allowed they just have to be smart about it.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's. That's why I feel sad about the whole story, that if in one version of this, the Apple employee is completely innocent of just being of anything, everything, except for just being a little bit careless. And we can all be especially like, if. If they've been with the company for a long time, if they've been following procedures for a long time, there's that thing where. So when you keep breaking rules for so long that. That without any consequences, eventually you forget that this is actually a rule that you're breaking. And that's how security lapses happen. So it makes me sad that they did something that was a very, very simple mistake to make. However, it was, when you're working for Apple, a fatal mistake for your job.

[Leo Laporte]

Peter Moore is saying in our YouTube chat is. And I didn't know this. The irony is that Prosser wasn't doing any more leaking, instead concentrating on documentaries. But this was too juicy for him to pass up. I think if. If Prosser's thinking of getting out of the league business, this might be exactly the impetus he needs.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

There's so many, though.

[Leo Laporte]

What.

[Andy Inatko]

How many movies are there of I'm just getting out and then there's like, okay, one more job. I don't know. I don't know if having to take screen captures of what the future looked like was really worth. I don't know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In March, no less. I mean.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's all changed anyway. It doesn't look anything like that anymore. So nice job. All right, well, I think everybody on this panel will. I don't. You know, I've been several times offered leaks, which I've always said, no, thanks, because we don't really deal in leaks. I let the pros handle that. You might be in a different situation, Jason. I don't know. Or Andy.

[Jason Snell]

No, I mean, we. I don't. I don't really deal in it either. I sometimes will get, like, hints about stuff that's going on. It's useful as background information to understand what's going on. But my job is also not to break that stuff. And it's not a game I want to be in.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, to me, it's not interesting because either. If you get something, something like that, either, either it's going to happen, in which case you'll know about it anyway, it's not going to change anybody's perception or anybody's planning in any way, or it's not true either because it's someone who's Faking something up or because it's just something that Apple is thinking about doing and they haven't decided yet. And you look kind of silly. Unless you're, unless you're a news site that does like eight actual pieces of news a day, you can say, oh, well, I got this. Don't know if it means anything, but onto the next thing. It's, it's just not what I'm interested in. And yeah, I mean, I bet that I'm kind of like Jason in that you hear things and things kind of float your way, but they're generally not like, excuse me, in my case, they're not like explosive. Oh, I bet you want to know. I bet you want to know that there's a new banana shaped phone that's coming out at the end of the year. I said, well, no, actually, I don't. How did you know? How do you know that?

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to vet it. It's. Yeah, it's not necessary to our business. We don't trade in the latest breaking news.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's more like it's. I don't have the resources to most of the time, something like that. To the extent like if in the fame in the famous situation with Gizmodo's iPhone, following that, if I had it, it's like I would need to line up a whole bunch of industrial designers and engineers to look at this and tell me what is interesting about this phone other than the shape. Because if all you're doing is showing people, hey, here's what it looks like, is that really worth any of the trouble and any of the risks you're going to or the lawyers that you would have had to have hired before you accepted such an offer to begin with and you can't really win because actually I remember at the time Gizmodo's publisher was like, using me as an example. Oh, well, Andy and Otko is like, really? That's. Oh, yeah. Well, because I think, I think I wrote a blog post at the time that basically said kind of like what I'm saying that I'm just not interested in that when I get information like.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy's a good guy.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, actually, actually it was worth it all see that. Because someone like Andy and not go, he does he. He doesn't publish stuff like that because he doesn't want to, to, to get Apple angry. And I was like, I was like, no, because a. I have a really. I'm representing the Chicago Sun Times and I don't want to get them sued for several million dollars for buying a piece of absolutely stolen property. Especially when. Anyway, it was, it was. That example was super funny because there was a way you could have done it that was completely legal, but you're dope and you decided to just say, oh, sure, I'll give you a few thousand dollars for obviously stolen iPhone. Not like what I'm gonna. Anyway, it was funny.

[Leo Laporte]

And it took about five years before Gizmodo got invited back to Apple events again. So it's not. Yeah, they were in, they were in timeout for a few years, that's all. All right, we gotta take a break. We come back more to talk about lots more. Some interesting stuff, including the Apple AI saga continues and a victory in the uk. But first, a word from our sponsor. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Inako, Alex Lindsey and Jason Snell. Great to have you here today. Our show this week brought to you by Zoc Talk. As soon as I say that, I bet you in the back of your head you go, oh, remember that doctor's appointment you were supposed to make a while ago? Yeah, yeah, that one. The one you meant to book and completely forgot about until now. You know that one. How about a, how about when's the last time you got your teeth cleaned? Your dentist appointment for your, you know, twice a year cleaning. How about, how's that going? Your annual checkup that's been three years in the making. A dermatology visit for that mole. You know, it keeps getting bigger. Or the rash you, you, you sent to, you know, AI for diagnosis, but you still haven't really asked a doctor about. You know, this might be a good time to talk to a doc at zocdoc. Why not book it today? Zocdoc, actually, they're the way you can find the right doctor right now, easily. It's all online and in many cases you can even book an appointment before the end of this ad read. So there's no excuse for putting it off. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. With Zocdoc, you can book in network appointments with more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty. Not just MDs, but mental health, dental health, primary care, urgent care. I've used Zocdoc to find gerontologist for my folks. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located nearby and who are a good fit for any medical you need. You may have. But my favorite feature of zocdoc hundreds of real verified patient reviews that you can really trust, which help you find the kind of doctor, the type of doctor you're looking for, the kind of care, the kind of support you're looking for. Whether it's good bedside manners or short wait times to doctors with the best listening skills or some of us just want a doctor who will tell us what to do. No, on one hand or the other hand, just say what to do. It's up to you. But the reviews will help you find the right doctor. And once you find them, you can see their actual appointment openings. Choose a time slot that works for you and click to instantly book a visit. The good news is appointments made through ZOCDOC happen fast. You know, one of the reasons we put it off is because, well, you know, it won't be this week anyway. Might be. Not this month anyway. No, no. Zocdoc appointments typically happen within 24 to 72 hours of booking. Not enough time to get cold feet. You're gonna go right in there. Most often than not. You can even get same day appointments. Trust me, that's the way to do it. I use it. You should use it too. Stop putting off those doctor appointments. Go to ZocDoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Zocdoc.com MacBreak Zocdoc.com Mac Break we thank them so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly. I like it because I can look up doctors that take Medicare, which as an old person makes me, makes me very happy. So the UK has backed down. Remember this whole kerfuffle with the Snoopers Charter where the UK said, apple, you have to give us clear text from messages? Apple said, well, in that case, we are taking back our advanced protection feature from everybody in the uk. Well now with some more pressure, especially tariff pressure from the administration, Sir Keir Starmer's government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK's demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data. This is from the Financial Times, who quote, two senior British officials. That's good news.

[Andy Inatko]

I think we saw that coming.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess. I mean, we knew that Apple would withdraw. But for the UK to say, okay, nevermind, yes, countries don't usually do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, they have a good quote here. This is something that the Vice President is very annoyed about and needs to be resolved. The Home Office.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to piss off J.D. vance, man.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh my God. You get into His Moriarty like steel trap of a cat and mouse mind. The home office is basically going to have to back down.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

But imagine being that being done in a posh accident.

[Leo Laporte]

I do suspect that one of the threats, the strongest threat is tariffs. Right.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, there's all kinds of things. I mean, it's also, you know, how the five eyes interact with each other. How the, like there's so many things that are going on here that we can say. Well, especially when you're talking about. Because of what this is, is security. Right. Of people's data.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and the Brits wanted to see American data as well as uk Right.

[Andy Inatko]

And that's. And that, and so that's a five eyes problem. You know, like, and that's like, that's the NSA saying, hey, how about we just cut you off, off, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, if you're gonna, you know. And I'm sure that there were a lot of private comp. Like when we think about, like, why are they doing this in public? I'm sure there were a lot of private conversations when people said, well, we're going to do what we're going to do. And they said, okay, well how about we do this? And you know, this is still, I mean, from a, from a scale perspective, the UK is a little smaller, so it's not, not a fair fight. And so if the United States decides they don't want to play anymore, I don't think it might be tariffs, but I bet you it's intelligence. I bet you there's a five eyes conversation going on about you can't take our.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, I remember Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, saying, we have an agreement with the UK that they won't do this.

[Andy Inatko]

So that's, yeah, that's part of that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's problematic. So nobody told Parliament, apparently. Anyway, good news. But meanwhile, Canada is now looking at a new bill that would in fact do the same thing. Encryption is under attack everywhere. And end to end, encryption particularly. And we just, I think it's important.

[Andy Inatko]

What's interesting about it is you have part of it, which is that there's an obvious security problem for Americans if we're compromised. But at the same time, you have the FBI, so you have one side of the country going, hey, you can't touch that. And the FBI really wants to get into all of that data. And so sometimes when you look at these things, it's really hard to tell who wants to, who wants what. And it's not always the same people in the. Even in our own government.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And it's tough because now they're trying to backdoor their way into it with age restrictions. And the EU was actually pilot testing age verification apps, which would basically, it would make. It would make it doubly difficult because now you're basically making it easier to identify everybody who is committing traffic to the Internet. And that's in itself a problem. It doesn't affect encryption so much, but once again, it's a grinding down of privacy in such a way that there won't be one huge battle. It will be. It's the slow boring of hard boards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If you are a Canadian citizen and you want to write your. What do they call them? Member of Parliament, your representatives in government, it's Bill C2, Canada's Bill C2, which expands encryption and surveillance powers. It's aimed at enhancing border and national security. But Matthias Fau, who runs Tutanota, says the Strong Borders act could quietly empower Canadian authorities with sweeping surveillance capabilities, including breaking end to end encryption. So it's currently under consideration. Something to keep in mind. It appears to. Well, it appears to attack encryption, so. So something to keep in mind. Let's see what else is going on in the world. Well, the new emoji game is here. Are you excited? It was Emoji Day last week. We forgot to celebrate.

[Alex Lindsay]

You forgot to celebrate? I had an emoji dunking booth. We had an emoji bouncing castle.

[Leo Laporte]

There are new emojis in the iOS 26 beta. You're getting. Well, there's a Bigfoot, which I've needed in my emojis for some time. A trombone.

[Jason Snell]

Just to be clear, let's not conflate these issues. These are not in the iOS 26 beta. In fact, you probably won't see these until like 26.1 or 0.2.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, sorry, you don't. We don't get them yet. What are they beta testing? These? What's the deal?

[Jason Snell]

Well, these are. They get finalized by the Unicode Consortium and then what happens is Apple has their artists build new emoji art and they put it in and they usually wait until the point one to the point two, so that. I think it's usually 0.1, so that it's actually a spur to get people to update their devices to the latest os because you can't see those emoji until you update. And it has been very successful for them over the last five years to do an emoji update and get everybody who's lingering behind to finally update to the new os.

[Leo Laporte]

So the Unicode Consortium has proposed these new emoji. They aren't officially ratified until. Until the fall. Until September. Which is why you can't put them in the betas.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It has said, though, we're gonna. This is. These are gonna happen. Apple corps, ballet dancers, a. Let's see. A Bigfoot, a distorted face, a fight cloud. As a fight cloud. I don't see that in this drawing. A fight cloud, I guess like in Popeye.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. There's a cloud with punching and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

With punching. Orca. A killer whale. Is that right? The orca. Yeah, There you go. And treasure chest and trombone. These new emoji have long standing symbolic meanings. Oh, well, I know what treasure chest will be used for.

[Alex Lindsay]

Technically, the Bigfoot is called hairy creature. If you go to.

[Leo Laporte]

The hairy creature is the technical.

[Alex Lindsay]

And he actually looks like the Harry and the Hendersons version of.

[Leo Laporte]

He does. He really does. Yeah, it's pretty clearly Bigfoot. Oh, there's the fight cloud. Yeah, there's the fight cloud. Nice.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. So. And we should say also this is a thing that people don't know about emoji, is that nobody owns emoji art. So the Unicode Consortium sets these code points, but every platform can make its own art. There is no.

[Leo Laporte]

And they release both a text description, which we've just read, but also a.

[Jason Snell]

A sample.

[Leo Laporte]

A sample, but it's not a requirement.

[Jason Snell]

So Apple has its own designers, Microsoft has its own designers, Facebook has its own designers. So you will see. So although that you don't like there to be emoji fragmentation, like when there was like some guns, guns were guns and some guns were squirt guns. Right. That sort of thing. Because then if you send to somebody on another platform, they might misunderstand what you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you shooting me or squirting me?

[Jason Snell]

My guess is that they'll all be in the ballpark of this. But like, if somebody didn't want it to look like that particular Bigfoot pose because it's a hairy creature, they could make it look different and have a different kind of hairy creature and everybody would just have to learn whose hairy creature was whose.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the landslide really looks like a mountain falling apart. It could be. I don't know. I think we could do better than this, to be honest. These are the emoji proposals from the Unicode Consortium.

[Alex Lindsay]

These are always interesting because they often reflect changes in society. I don't think so much this year. Although maybe Cryptid Bigfoot could be an exception. But like there was a year when the syringe emoji, I think, actually changed from. Yeah, yeah. Because it used to be. It used to be like filled with blood, as though you're taking a blood sample. And then it became like an inoculation sort of emoji emoji instead.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I love it that the Unicord Consortium uses basically a generic blogger template.

[Alex Lindsay]

I thought it was blogspot.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they don't do that. The place to go is emojipedia.org, which love that it's not run by the Unicode Consortium, but Jeremy Berg founded that and Keith Brioni still blogs about this.

[Leo Laporte]

And we've had Jeremy on our shows many times.

[Jason Snell]

That's the place. They have a good looking website.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This looks nice. It's pretty. It's got lots of emoji.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they should go to hell for focusing on the content instead of the design. Good heavens.

[Jason Snell]

Shame on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they have an AI emoji generator.

[Jason Snell]

Honestly, if you are a consortium, your website should probably look boring.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jason Snell]

Any consortium.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't want spending time.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing things like web design.

[Jason Snell]

Leave that for others. Yes, Consortia.

[Leo Laporte]

Consortia. All right. There you go. We always have this. This is our yearly tribute to emoji. No, I haven't played the emoji game, which is Apple's tribute to emoji. Have you guys played that? I don't. You must. It's on the. I think it's on the beta. Yeah, you have to have News plus. So I guess it's not on the beta. It was announced for iOS 26, but they have now pushed it out.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's like their Wordle sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Should I open up News plus and we could play a game or two.

[Alex Lindsay]

It just has a very 70s game show sort of vibe to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I kind of agree. You're still loving the recipes, Alex. You're still a big fan of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

That.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. I have to admit that I only use them for specific, like, oh, I really want to do something special because mostly between that I've learned that if you add curry to things, it just tastes good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always good.

[Andy Inatko]

Number one, even chicken salad with curry is better. Well, it's the worst part. Now I got fresh curry and now it's ruined the powdered curry, you know, so. But the.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you get fresh. What is fresh curry? I always have curry in the jar with the. The.

[Andy Inatko]

No, I know it was like, well, first I learned that, first of all.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S no spice called curry. It's a combination. Right. Cumin.

[Andy Inatko]

And there's a lot of things in it. And the, the. I think there actually is curry plant, but I'm not 100 sure. So the. Anyway, but there's curry. And at first you learn that, you know, salt and pepper isn't just enough. You can add curry to things. And most things will taste better if you add some curry, you powder to it. And then you go to the farmer's market and you walk past this guy selling fresh curry every week for months, and you finally go, I'll give it a shot. You know, like, I was just like.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S the difference between fresh ginger and dried ginger. It is.

[Andy Inatko]

It is exactly that way. It's like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's.

[Andy Inatko]

And. And so I was like, ah, I'll try it. Because you can't test it there because there's nothing to cook with it. It's just like a jar. So like $12 for this jar of fresh curry and you take it home. And the first veggies I made with.

[Leo Laporte]

It, I was like, oh, I want some fresh curry.

[Andy Inatko]

I'll get you some. It's. It's a San Rafael.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just asking AI if there is a curry plant, and apparently there is Helichrysum italicum, the curry plant. It's a small perennial herb with silver gray leaves and clusters of. Huh. I always thought curry was kind of.

[Andy Inatko]

A garam masala is really like a mixture of a bunch of things and it's. But anyway, yeah, it's. It's a. So. So between that and there's also a curry tree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

And between that and Chatgpt, I have to admit that I look for recipes and it's come to the point where I use a lot of the. I save a lot of recipes. Like, oh, that'd be really cool. But the thing in news is that when you see any recipe now that it looks remotely interesting, you just go, save. I'll save that recipe. And I love the formatting of it. I think that Apple could, like, always. I think Apple sometimes plays with ideas that. I mean, everybody does this, but they play with ideas and they don't take it to where it could go. Like if they started going through the most popular ones that are saved the most often or something like that, and started taking. Looking at what Heston did, like Heston made, they closed, by the way, the Heston pan, they stopped making them or their end of life in them, which is very sad.

[Leo Laporte]

No, yeah, yeah. I got the Heston cues because of you.

[Andy Inatko]

Here's the funny thing is that I feel like I always, when I see something die like that. That is such a cool thing. You're like, what happened? And I think it was the interaction. The Bluetooth controller that was in the pan was quirky. Like, it just didn't always line up. And it was. And you just stopped playing with it. Like, you stopped using it that way because you couldn't get it to be reliable. And so you built this. It's just a great lesson in. You spent all this money on technology. They made all this great content. And the one little thing that they didn't, that I'm sure they saved money on, is that they didn't quite get this interaction with the phone and the thing to work smoothly, you know, and tell you. Mostly tell you what's not working right. And so it was always like a problem that you couldn't quite get over. And so the. The. But their content of how to cook is the best content ever made, in my opinion, around cooking. Like, it was step by step by step. It would tell the pan what to do. It had videos of exactly how to do everything. It had, you know, it told you what to look for. And it was. It was amazing. And I feel like if Apple, you know, if only if Apple had the money, because, you know, the problem with Apple, they're always like, short on tight. I know, but when you look at their fitness app. App, if they. If they took the same thing that they're doing with fitness and just said, we're going to take a bunch of these recipes, or we're going to create all these great recipes of all the stuff that most people make and then make these incredible, like, tutorials that are very similar to what Heston did, I just think it would be. I mean, people would get really excited about that and. And use it a lot, you know, but they won't because it's, you know, and it would. And again, they could boil the ocean for $10 million.

[Leo Laporte]

Still make regular pans or they make.

[Andy Inatko]

They make incredible pans.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. They still making their regular pants. They're just not making the Bluetooth pants.

[Andy Inatko]

The smart ones. And. And there's other people that got into the market with the smart ones and. Because, you know, and it's something you want to work. It's just that the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you also need a special induction burner and.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, the induction stuff. Well, yeah. And so. And there's other People that have come out with those. And so that's also part of the problem is there's. There's competition that costs less money. I mean, the Heston stove top, which is what you really want, is like 4,500 bucks. And so you're like, okay, well, that's an investment, you know, And. But I will say that, like, when you. When it was working, when it was working for me, me, the idea that you could just set something to 450 degrees and it just goes straight up and you put something else on it and it goes right back up to that. It's. You kind of like, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one of the advantages of induction stove tops, too, though. I mean. Right.

[Andy Inatko]

But it just being. But the fact that you could. It could. It knew what the. The pan temperature was meant that it was able to get the pan to the right temperature immediately and stay there. And it would just keep on staying there, and it would just instantly get it to where it needed to go. And so you felt like it was the future. It just. That again, the little. One little whole broken door. And it kind of killed. In my opinion, kind of killed that. That whole thing. But I think that it would be really. I think that hopefully what I'm hoping with Apple's recipes to go back to Apple is, is that they look at that and start taking. Okay, a lot of people are saving things about this kind of food or this kind of food or this kind of food. What if we built a studio, like fitness, and built a bunch of things that showed you how to do that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wouldn't that be cool if Apple did that?

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, if Apple did. If they literally just. Just hire the people that did the Heston, I would bet more people can work out. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just saying.

[Andy Inatko]

I think we're all proof of that. And so anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

So the.

[Andy Inatko]

So. So.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think some of us do both. But most people at least eat. Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. And the thing is, everyone's doing that three times a day. You could really make. And again, when you talk about health, the. The. I think the reason people buy things in boxes is someone who's not now kind of slowly on this path of not buying anything in boxes. I mean, literally, I. I have a car. I'm one of those people now with the cart at the food at the farmers market.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that, like, has your name on it.

[Andy Inatko]

No, no, it's just that I. No, I have a. I have a. Oh, you just bring a giant card, pops open. Because I'm Grocery shopping. Like I'm not, you know, and I've.

[Leo Laporte]

Stopped those little old ladies walking home with, trailing the little car.

[Andy Inatko]

It's funny, it's, it's very, there's a whole culture there. People are, are, they'll ask you okay, what are you, what are you cooking and what are you going to do with this? I'm like, that's fun. Just lunch.

[Leo Laporte]

You used to do cooking on Saturdays at office hours. You still do that?

[Andy Inatko]

No. You know, my wife didn't like me turning the, the kitchen into a studio. So that was the big. It's like this, the weekend and so.

[Leo Laporte]

If I ever get my own, did marry you. I mean, this is kind of goes with the territory.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, but you know, you know, there's a, there's the, there's the saying that is the, the thing that we all.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy wife, happy life.

[Andy Inatko]

Yes. If you stay inside that, inside that box, man, life is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I know how that is.

[Andy Inatko]

I stay inside the box. That's one box I stay inside of.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, okay, fine. Apple is losing ground in the AI talent war. Interesting scoop. I think it was from the information that Apple, at least some people at the Apple AI researchers wanted to release some of their models to the public as open source models. And Craig Federighi said nyet Ruming Pang, who has since left Apple, by the way, for a high paying job at OpenAI or I'm sorry, at Meta, where he's rumored to be earning $200 million over four years. Not quite quarterback money, but in the ballpark. Pang wanted to. He was the head of the Apple foundation models team, wanted to release his open source model. Craig Federighi said no, according to two people with knowledge of the matter and Aaron Tilly and Way Ma writing at the information. Releasing the models as open source would show how the software underperformed rival models. Craig said he was more concerned that the public would believe Apple was making too many compromises to getting the software running on the phones. Pang wanted it to go open waits open source so that others could work on it and help them improve it. I don't know if Meta has benefited from that philosophy. In fact, there was a rumor, I don't know if it's not confirmed, that Meta was even thinking of pulling back its open source llama models. In any event, last week Pang announced on LinkedIn that he is out of here. He's going to Meta for some big money along with other team members, including one Tom Gunter who was going to OpenAI. But when Pang went to Meta, he Said, okay, I'm going to meta. Gunter was one of the first people at the company to explore large language models according to the information and was often the face of Pang's team at bigger company wide events. So a pretty big loss for Apple from the information scoop.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it feels like that's one of the big problems when you lose like one of the leads. The members of that, the members of that team are like, well now what am I doing here?

[Jason Snell]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I mean teams like to stay together.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Especially when there's $100 million checks involved.

[Alex Lindsay]

That helps too.

[Leo Laporte]

Certainly helps. Certainly not that Apple under. I'm sure he was well compensated at Apple.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, if you don't again from a lot of teams it's a for people want to feel like they're going to be part of something that's going to go somewhere and it also has to do with. It may not be money right now, but it's money in the future. If you're an also ran team, the value of what you can do down the road is affected dramatically.

[Leo Laporte]

And Zuckerberg did say it's not just the money. He said these guys want access to compute and we've got more compute than anybody. We've got all those GPUs. So they want to use the resources.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, fair enough. I just want to point out though that there's another read on this which is Apple has identified probably a strategic advantage they have which is privacy and keeping things on device.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

And they built the neural engine and they built the GPU power and they're presumably going to be ramping that up in future devices that they build. And from this report it sounds to me like this team wants to build stuff in the cloud. And if you're Craig Federighi, I mean, yeah, the open source thing that it does sound sort of dumb to me if all he's really trying to do is disguise what Apple is doing and that that may be a cultural fit but. Or a cultural misfit. But if Apple has decided that they really need to lean into making the on device models as good as they can because that's where they have a place to shine and differentiate themselves. And this team isn't really interested in that, thinks it's baby LLM and wants to have huge access to giant cloud servers, that's a mismatch of, of direction. Right. And so I do wonder if some of what's going on here is the people on this team not wanting to go where Apple wants them to go. And I think Both of those perspectives might be valid, right? Like if I'm Apple, I probably would want to lean into making great on device models. And if I'm an AI researcher, I might be like, that's boring. I want to be up in the cloud where, you know, we can do these amazing things and, and I think those are, are both valid. And if that's where Apple wants to go, it needs to find researchers who are interested in and, and their, one is not fundamentally better than the other. To make an amazingly good private on device model is also a big accomplishment. But if you're an AI researcher and that is not how you measure success, I could see how that wouldn't work with, for you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, the, the key being the word researcher, like they're not necessarily there to enhance their goal in life. When they decided to do all that study and all that work and give up, a give up on going to movies and stuff wasn't, hey, I'm going to make the next iPhone speech recognition work a lot better. It really was. I'm going to, I'm going to, there's going to be a period, I'm going to make a discovery and for a period of time I will know something that nobody else in the world knows until the paper gets published. And that's the way that I'm going to change the world. And it's not just, and making a lot of money now is really, really great, but being 60 years old and being thought of as one of the giants of your field, that's super great.

[Andy Inatko]

And even, even that, I mean, sometimes they just want to play like the, you know, the idea is I'm really smart, I'm coming up with a bunch of stuff. I remember talking to a, to a, to somebody that worked in a group, in a large company, not, not in Silicon Valley, and, but they had a lot of money. They had a team of like 30, 30 people and they're working on technologies and they were paid to work on that technology. And I said, when are you going to put out a product? And they're like, never, Never. We're going to put out a product. Like other teams will come and talk to us and we'll tell them cool things that we're doing, we'll tell them how we do it, we'll make it all work, but we're never making a product. And they were really like opinionated about never having a product. And I was like, why? And he goes, as soon as you start making a product, then you stop doing anything. You're like, now it's all bugs things and figuring things out and it's not fun anymore. It wasn't, it wasn't a. No one knows who they are. So there was no whatever. It was just that they were having fun and they, and fun would stop as soon as they had to turn it into a product.

[Jason Snell]

And I think this is a cultural problem with Apple is that Apple, it's a, is a company in general that is very focused on shipping product and doing pure research. And like they can spend the money to do pure research. And I do wonder if one of the dynamics going on here is that this group was more of a research group. Gian Andrea strikes me as being a research guy too. And then, and then every, there's a freak out, out and Apple is like, your research hasn't given us our product. And they're like, but we're just doing research. I get that. Again, there's a, it feels to me like there's just a mismatch here where, where ML has gone from being kind of like, you go do your research and we'll figure out how to productize it to. Suddenly it's like, oh God, the ML is the product. And Apple's priorities don't necessarily match those. I'm, you know, I just, it's so easy to say, oh, people leave an Apple that's bad for Apple. But like, I think that there might nuance here in terms of what Apple's priorities are and what their priorities are. And you know, I actually wish them luck because I think a lot of these companies, the pure research thing isn't going to fly. But like, if you're in an area where you can do the research you're interested in doing as part of an overall product strategy, that's a better fit for you. And I'm not sure that that is Apple.

[Andy Inatko]

And even if it's not the hundred million dollars, I mean, if someone walks up to you as a programmer and says, well, especially in the environment where AI is replacing a lot of programmers and eventually might replace you, and they say you can make $5 million a year for the, or $2 million a year, and these aren't the giant numbers that we're talking about now, a lot of programmers would be crazy not to like, let's get enough money for a farmhouse, you know, like, you know, like, you know, out of, out of this deal. Especially when I think that for most programmers, you know, life is uncertain at.

[Alex Lindsay]

The moment, you know, but again, the difference between a programmer, an engineer and a researcher, I Remember talking to like one freshly minted ex Apple researcher who, whose attitude was that the thing is, at least at the time, and this is like three or four years out of date, the culture of secrecy was completely incompatible with how he saw his career as a researcher going because he just wasn't allowed to talk about the work that he was doing at the time. He felt as though he wasn't being allowed to publish papers. And so therefore his standing as a researcher, as an academic was basically a dead zone of his time at Apple. And one of the reasons why he left was because he wanted to basically make that kind of impact. Not as somebody who again would be one of the secret people who made speech recognition better on the iPhone. He wanted to leave behind when he's 60 or 70 years old. Here are all the papers that I've published, here's all the patents that I've been issued. Here is all the stuff that like, here's all the lectures that I've given. I want, I'm doing, I'm creating a body of work that goes beyond again having six years or 10 years at Apple on my LinkedIn. And yeah, money is great, but there's, they're not, once they are rich enough that they could do whatever they want, whatever they want to do is not necessarily again being an anonymous academic inside Apple who can't tell anybody, who can't share his work with the rest of the community.

[Leo Laporte]

Well and interestingly, Apple had just published this Apple Intelligence foundation language models tech report with no byline, which makes kind of wonder. It's actually really interesting approach and I think that people will be very impressed with what Apple, the thinking Apple has done. But it's unclear who wrote this and whether they're losing the people who came up with this or maybe not. But a lot of the work is done so that it will be fast and performant on a small hardware device like an iPhone.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a 27 page report. There is a list of, of contributors at the very end that goes on for like actually wow, four. Actually goes on for four pages.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So let's see who the first name is on it. Wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

Please hold your, please hold your applause until all four.

[Andy Inatko]

And that makes it harder to pick. Pick it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's in random order. There you go. Yeah. So that's intentional. They put it in random order still. They're doing some very interesting work. I'm not enough of an expert in AI to know, but it sounds like they're doing some stuff that is very targeted at the uses they want to put Apple intelligence to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And as much as we can find fault, like legitimately or otherwise, this is still early days for Apple. They're still a year away from actually releasing anything concrete. Probably a couple of years away from doing something that is objectively impressive because again, they're still getting these wheels spun up on this new mandate that they have. They have. So it's okay for them to be where they are right now? It would be. There's a reason why Google is getting Google and, and Meta and OpenAI are getting all the attentions because they are trying to push the, they have the resources and they have the 10 years or 15 years of hard work on this that they are feeling the fruits of these, of these early research labors. Whereas Apple is, has just put the metal pedal of the metal like fairly recently, two or three years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

And one of the things that Apple did say in this report is that they respect robots txt, which not all AI scrapers do. So Apple Bot will not, you know, scrape your site if you explicitly say don't. They also say they use a publicly available web data and they license some data. Unclear how much they're paying or for whom with whom they are licensing it. But this is Apple trying to be a responsible user of AI.

[Alex Lindsay]

They've said it before and. But the one qualification for that is that when they say they use public data, I think they're still referring to a public data set that was in itself a whole bunch of scrape data. So I don't know if they carved out an exception there.

[Leo Laporte]

I admit Apple applied layers of filtering to remove low quality unsafe or irrelevant content, including spammy pages, shallow or templated text and broken formatting. But everybody does that. That's part of the training process. That's normal. Yeah, I guess they're saying we're trying to be responsible. This is a very good piece, by the way. 9 to 5 Mac Marcus Mendez analyzing. If the actual tech report is too much for you, which it was for me, analyzing some of the innovative stuff they're doing and I think it's quite interesting.

[Andy Inatko]

And again, Apple has the unique opportunity, as Jason's pointed out a little bit too, is Apple. Apple has a bunch of unique opportunities and unique leverage that no one else has. Everyone else is kind of on a software layer trying to figure this all out or they're buying, you know, or they have the hardware layer. They don't have both. And figuring that out is a pretty interesting opportunity for Apple, especially with the number of users that potentially could have that in their pocket.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. We'll have to see all the models that are out there. They do have a mobile component to it. It, because it is, remember this is one of the few areas which it is actually in Google's best interest to put as much compute on the device as possible so that they don't have to spend the money for compute power, they have to spend the money for energy, all that other sort of stuff. I acknowledge that that's an advantage that Apple has. I don't know how big an advantage it's going to be.

[Andy Inatko]

I think it's a very small advantage today. I think it's potentially a very large advantage five years from now when you're building all that hardware and you're building all the chips and you're building like the design. As those designs mold, you know, come together. I think they can do something organically that is very difficult to do with lots of other companies. And so that's, you know, they can, they can have lots of discussions, but having discussions between companies and being the company that does the all of the things is, is a much different experience. And I think that's where Apple, I think Apple, that's what they're going to at least try to leverage.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's where they're at for that point.

[Andy Inatko]

Google's.

[Alex Lindsay]

Google's also designing their own mobile Tensor chips. They've had them since the Pixel 6 and they now have two or three years worth of experience and you can't. And although it's great, it's, I think it's optimal to have all of that in one shop as Apple does. That doesn't mean that these other companies are buying chips off the shelf. They have, they have the cloud to basically have a company basically design, co design a chip or have a, have a chip company design something to their specifications. So all I'm saying is that it's unknown how big this advantage is going to be even five years from now.

[Andy Inatko]

Agreed.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. You're listening to MacBreak weekly. Andy Inocco, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsey. Glad you're here. Our show today, brought to you by my new mattress. And I have to say I'm very happy about that. Last week we got our Helix sleep. We've been sleeping on it all week and it is so nice. There's so many things you do on your mattress besides just sleeping, by the way. I mean it's an important part of your life. More than eight hours a day. You got movie nights with your partner Partners, Morning cuddles with our kitty cat, Rosie. Your wind down ritual. After long days, my favorite thing to do is curl up with a good book. And I love my Helix Sleep for that. But of course, I also love it because it's the most comfortable mattress I've ever had. Not just. Well, you know, one of the things people complain about with their mattress. Night sweats. Waking up hot and sweaty or your back is hurting because your mattress is sagging or you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. There were times when I've woken up saying, was that an earthquake? Oh, no, it was just the cat. These are classic mattress nightmares. They happen no more with my Helix Sleep. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You get the deep sleep you deserve. One buyer recently reviewed the helix sleep with 5 stars. I love my Helix mattress. I will never, never sleep on anything else. I concur. I am really happy. You know, they say you have to replace your mattress every six to 10 years. We are about eight years into our old mattress and I thought this would be a good time. So I looked around and man, I saw the reviews time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. Wired's Best Mattress 2025 as if that weren't enough, Good Housekeeping's Betting Awards 2025 for premium plus size support. GQ Sleep Awards 2025 for best hybrid mattress. New York Times Wirecutter 2025 featured for plus size Oprah Daily Sleep Awards 2025 best hotel like feel. The Leo Laporte Twit Award for the best night's sleep.

[Andy Inatko]

Oprah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that wasn't in there, but I give it that. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during the 4th of July sale. Best of web offer extended. That's helixsleep.com twit, for 27% off sitewide exclusive for listeners of Mac Break Weekly. This offer ends on July 31st. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, still be sure to check them [e-mail] tweet. You're going to get the perfect mattress, I'm telling you. Helixsleep.com TWIT I wish you could come over and take a nap. I really, I do. Because you would, you would, you would say yeah, yeah, you're right, Leo. This is great. Helixleep.com TWIT okay, okay. By the way, I ordered. I decided I was really thinking about this, you know, next year we're gonna, we're starting to see a lot of rumors and next year we're gonna see, we think, the folding iPhone. And I thought I should really try the state of the art. So I did order this new Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Ultra Thin, which comes out Friday, I think. Yeah, the 25th. Just. I know they're expensive. I'm trading in the flip get a little bit off of that. But I thought I really ought to see. Cause they have made it very thin. The reviews are very positive. I think this is what Apple's competing against. Right. And Samsung, Samsung, this is their seventh fold. They have a lot of experience behind this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And I think it did take at least six years for them to get over that really, really bad first impression that the first version of the product made.

[Leo Laporte]

But I had the first three and I never ordered another one for that reason. They were clunky.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. No, it wasn't until like actually probably the six that I started thinking that, geez, I could use a phone like this. And the new version, they've. They're now in the, they now know how to manufacture these screens. They now know how to make them as durable as a folding display can be. And now they're in the refinement stage of things where now that you don't have to have that cover screen that is of this really, really weird shape or has this really, really weird bezels that makes you feel like, I'm not supposed to be using the phone this way. I'm supposed to be using it unfolded as well as adding all kinds of user interface enhancements to take advantage of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Does Apple, Apple get the benefit though of that? I mean, they're going to buy their screens from Samsung, right? Yeah, that's the room.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. It feels to me like this is. Apple's been, you know, Apple hasn't been sitting on the sideline doing nothing. I think Apple's been looking at all of these, all of the stuff that Samsung is building, all of the foldables that are out there. That Mark Gurman's report is that Apple is, you know, going to tweak some things about the hinge or whatever. But like this, this not only does this newest Samsung phone feel like the moment to me, it feels like the moment where Apple looks at it and goes, all right, like it's time. And so next year we'll get there. And that, that, that thin phone this year will also be the how do we make the iPhone thin enough that we can, you know, do a little ice cream sandwich of two of them in a foldable the following year. So they've been lining this up. But yeah, Samsung display is an Apple partner and I think Apple has been probably pushing them to be big, better and they want to be better. And with this latest Samsung phone, it is better. The reviews are good and I would imagine that next year's iteration will be the moment that, you know, Samsung will have that, but Apple will also sort of step on the treadmill at that point. And what you said about the first three models being disappointing, like not only is Apple really good at waiting for the moment where they think that, you know, wherever they've set their bar and sometimes they wait a little too long, but I think that they do a pretty good job. But keep in mind also the scale that Apple works for at you got to get it right and you got to be able to ship it in huge volumes. Even for an expensive $2,000 phone being an iPhone, it will sell well.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't I would feel over there this Samsung sell almost as many phones if not more.

[Alex Lindsay]

More?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but of the fold maybe not, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, they have. No, not. And they have so much, so many different models and Apple's very concentrated. I guess what I'm saying is I feel like Samsung has always been able to afford to throw out wacky models because they got other phones that you can buy that are just fine and Apple has been a lot slower to do that. And Apple, Apple isn't comfortable just throwing out a wacky model that isn't very good and then isn't going to sell very well. So they do try to wait because. And now there's probably pent up demand for a folding iPhone on top of it. So like they want to get it right. But I mean that. And in all looking at all the coverage of that new Samsung phone, I just really got the vibes like, like we finally have reached that point where it's not for everybody but like this is of a caliber of, of product that it no longer feels like a curiosity but like a real option.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And Apple has two huge advantages that Samsung never had because the, the minute that Apple does a folding iPhone, even if they did it three years ago, if you unfold it and it turns into an iPad, you have an immensely useful piece of hardware and immensely. Whereas for years the Google itself has been just absolutely terrible in scaling Android above the size of a phone screen. So that's why Samsung had to build a whole bunch of extra stuff just to make it into a practical, practical experience when you make it into a larger display instead of just stretching a phone app to fill the thing. Or just let's have one app on this left side one another app on the right side now. And Google has gotten on the stick for the past three years about that. And that's exactly one of the biggest features that they're touting about the new Android this year, next year. But the thing is the minute that you unfold an iPhone and it turns into an iPad, that justifies at least $500 of the expense. And the second advantage is that Apple users are very, very comfortable in spending $2,000 on something that they think is worth it. And this is going to be. If it's less than $2,000, that will be a very, very happy surprise. I think Apple might.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what the Fold 7 is.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jason Snell]

The last seven years has been on.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hundred dollars since last year too.

[Jason Snell]

So I mean just to reinforce something Andy said, the last seven years has been Apple sort of starting to explore how much could we charge for an iPhone and people still buy. It started with the iPhone 10 and has continued and we see it with Max now. And the answer is they still don't know because there are people exists in the world. Exactly.

[Andy Inatko]

There's, there's a ceiling there somewhere. We just, we just can't find it.

[Jason Snell]

You don't know where it is though.

[Alex Lindsay]

But Jason's absolutely right. It had to for Apple to do it have to wait for how do we make it so that when you fold it up it's about as thick as a regular phone? How do we make it so that you can get the regular battery life and just making batteries that thin is not a trivial thing about how do we make it durable enough that we're not going to have an immense amount of returns inside the inside warranty Samsung review thing.

[Jason Snell]

The detail with the Samsung review that I like the most that I noticed is the reviewer saying that they use it close and it feels like a phone.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a huge shift.

[Jason Snell]

That is a huge threshold to get over that you're not holding an ice cream sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

We had Abrar Al Heedi from CNET on Twitter on Sunday and that's exactly what she said and that's what put me over the top is oh well if I could keep it closed and it isn't much thicker than a regular phone and I have a full size screen on the front, that's a phone. And then if I want more screen real estate I've got it inside. That sounds pretty good. That sounds. Sounds like a good combination.

[Jason Snell]

Right. And Apple's experience, I mean this is one of those things we talk about the Vision Pro being like, maybe in 10 years there'll be a relevant product here and we'll be ready for it. That is. And Andy's right, Google has done a lot has worked. They have really worked to make the tablet app experience better on Android. And because it will. It lagged for so long. But like that's. This is one of those cases where we've had the iPad for like 15 years now. And, and that. That is a real advantage that there are iPad apps that there. There are ip. Like this thing is just going to open up and be an iPad mini, basically. And that is a. Again, Apple users get what that is as. And he said it's like $500 off right there because now it's your iPad too. There's a lot going for it. It's a really. It's not going to be for everybody. We're going to get. A lot of people are going to be like, it's so stupid. I don't want to buy a $2,000 iPhone. It's like, don't buy it then. But there will be an audience for it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that just occurred to me right now is that. That I'm not predicting this, but I wonder if there's a temptation for Apple to say, what kind of a physical keyboard could we sell alongside this? We maybe can't do a magic keyboard, but maybe we can. Or maybe we can do a mini keyboard that doesn't stink, but mag safes to the side of it so that at least in your pocket, it's a very nice little collected sort of thing. Maybe. Will they maybe work with Logitech or somebody to say here's. Could you develop something that seems like it's a natural accessory that would make this into a productivity device when it's unfolded.

[Jason Snell]

And it's that old Palm keyboard that came with its own easel attached to it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Basically.

[Jason Snell]

It's that kind of thing. Unfold it, plop it in.

[Alex Lindsay]

You joke, but I've been. One of the results of cleaning out my entire office is that I now have a box of like pocketable foldable keyboards. When I was trying to. Writing about them and trying to find the right one and I took that out, the one that worked, worked with a Palm and I'm like, this feels nice.

[Jason Snell]

It's pretty good. I used to have one of those three.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the One I bought one that you recommended, Andy, that was like a thin one that would then opened up like that. It was a, it was a nice one. I can't remember.

[Alex Lindsay]

There are a couple that I like. The two solutions that I love are the kind where they do a magical like three way hinge so that you still get like the same sort of like interlocking sort of keys. And the second one is like Jason said, there was one where you got this beautiful metal cigarette box that you unfold it and then you slide the sides of it together forming like a full size laptop keyboard.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, it was so good.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the thing is, even as I'm going through these and admiring them, I'm recalling the fact that. Okay, but Andy, your solution is not necessary. The solution you seek is not to carry it all in one pocket, but to make it take as little space in your laptop as possible. Why not just get like a keyboard? Like, like not. Yeah, again. Yeah, I forget. I really need to do a look at these because now I've seen on video and in pictures there the. The search for a good mobile keyboard has led to keyboards that are. They're trying to. Is. Is it like 62% normal size like this, the small compact size. And I remember it seems like the size of the original like Newton message pad key keyboard, which I regard, I remember as. Okay, I'm okay with this, but I don't want it to be much smaller than this.

[Jason Snell]

Right, yeah, there's a threshold there I just. I got for the people watching on video. This is my Palm 3. And I did, I took a. I took a trip. It's the clear one. Yeah, I took a trip to the UK and I brought that little folding keyboard that Andy talked about in this. And yeah, it did. You literally attached to the serial pin. So it was this thing. You fold it out and slid it together, together and then you popped this in a doc at the top and then you could type and it was just this incredibly small thing that you, you could type on and take it away. And these days, obviously things are different, but I love the idea of having a like a little tiny thing that you could unfold or roll out or whatever and suddenly you've got your whole office with you. And it was previously just your phone in your pocket. I love it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I gotta say, I'm looking through Flickr as, as I speak. So the one year at the Commerce on World affairs at the University of Colorado, speaking for an entire week, my desk, my key, my computer was like a Palm Pilot. And the nice fold out keyboard. And every time like every, every, every, every talk was like a panel of four people. And when I take my seat and my notes are on, I would deploy this thing. I felt like it was such a power move. Like oh wow. Oh, you have a pencil and a notepad. Oh, that's click, click, click, click, click.

[Leo Laporte]

Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Well, I'd be very curious to see if Apple does that. I don't feel like they will, but you never know. You never know.

[Jason Snell]

They'll use a trusted partner. Yeah, they'll use a trust Belkin or Logitech or something. That's what they do.

[Leo Laporte]

There are lots of rumors about what Apple's going to be doing. Gurman says they are going to benefit from Samsung's seven years of experience. They say Apple's. He says Apple's first foldable won't break any technological barriers or redefine the category. Samsung's already taking care of much of the heavy lifting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Although they are starting to. He does say that iOS27 will have a lot of features specifically for that folding screen, which is interesting.

[Jason Snell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know if you call it an advantage, but that's an interesting thing about Samsung. They're not afraid to make the first thing kind of stink, right?

[Andy Inatko]

Well they've got a lot of different ones. I mean the thing is Apple has so many, so few skews.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right, Exactly.

[Andy Inatko]

So, so Samsung's got all these SKUs and they're like well this is just one experiment.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but, but not only that, but like oftentimes they're half baked. Like, like the. Hey wow, we're the first one to do facial recognition unlock. Yeah, yeah, but it kind of stinks. Yeah, but the next year will be better. But this, but this also pays off. When, remember that they were the first, remember when the, the first Samsung Galaxy Note camera came out and like oh my God, look at it. It must be 6 inches large. What kind of crazy person carry a phone like that? Like they sold how many?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, I bought every one of them. Every one of them. I loved them and I loved the pen. I was sad that they've abandoned the S pen, but that's what they had to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, that's, that's such a weird decision for like one of the nice things about having a foldable foldable phone is that let's treat it like a tablet. Why not make it pen.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a pen. Have a pen. Anyway, more rumors. We'll get to those in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason and you. I'm glad you're here. This episode brought to you by Red Canary when cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility, and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more.

[Andy Inatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

More rumors from Mark Gurman the iPad Pro for M5, which will come out later this year, will have cameras on the side and the top. So you can. That's an interesting. I guess that makes sense.

[Jason Snell]

I mean I do a FaceTime with my mom on my iPad every week and, and she uses her phone and so I have to hold it vertically, which by the way, there's no reason for that. Apple should just auto crop it to the right aspect ratio. What is going on here? Why is that the case? But it is the case and so I do that. And now that they moved it to the, to the side or you know, on, on that orientation, it's, it's. I like it in every other way, but that's the one time I use my iPad there. This is not going to cost them a lot of money. I don't think they're replicating face ID on both. It's not going to be the whole sensor stack, it's just going to be a camera. And if there's ever an iPad that could afford that extra tiny piece of technology, it's the iPad Pro, which already costs so much money that adding a second camera is just not a big deal. It's fine.

[Andy Inatko]

I will also say that, as the geek in me will say, if they take full advantage of two front facing cameras, it means that the, the 3D models they can build with that much apparel parallax is impressive. Like, you know, if you put, if you get structured light so you have the LIDAR system and then you've got two cameras that are far apart like that, that would be huge. Like huge.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I'm asking this literally like, but could they, could they correct it with software or would you have to shoot it like on the diagonal like this so that both of the cameras.

[Andy Inatko]

Not spatial. So I'm not talking about spatial. What I'm talking about is if you have an off object, if I have an object that is, you know, a box here and I'm looking at it one from the side and one above going down, I have two very different angles. Right now you got to really do that with the spatial cameras that are in the phone. It can do it a little bit, but they're too close together. So what happens is, is that what you're looking at is think about the way GPS or photogrammetry works is building triangles. And the wider that triangle is between the two cameras without where they're still overlapping, but the further apart they get and still overlap in a meaningful way, the easier it is to grab onto that 3D data and understand what, what they're looking at. And so if Apple doesn't do it, I feel like developers will be able to grab onto that. But if you get a point where I can grab onto an iPad and point it at something and man, I don't know if they'll do this, but if I had the LIDAR sensor that I have on the back of a camera and then I had those two things, my ability to build 3D models, I mean, it would be magical because the structure captured light from the lidar means that I know exactly how big that object is. And two cameras really far apart from each other means that I can gather a lot of detail and texture and lighting and all kinds of other things from two different angles. It could potentially allow them to very fast turn real, real world objects into 3D objects for VR. So beyond, beyond just being convenient, I don't know if they'll do that. I just made that up right now. But, but I think that it, but I think that it's potentially really exciting.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's, that's great. I hadn't even thought about that. Now you've got me thinking like what could you do if. Could you take advantage of the fact that, okay, fine, the one that, the one that's at the top of the screen, depending on your orientation is going to be like your conference camera. But if someone enters the frame, it can use the second one as a. So it's going to zoom in on you with a, with a primary camera camera. But then if it senses that, oh, someone's entering into the frame, I'm going to cut to a wide angle using the second camera or have different settings for the second camera.

[Andy Inatko]

But it could be delivering both of those camera. I mean, I think Apple's already proven that they're willing to deliver from multiple cameras at one time. So being able to grab onto things. But I think that from a, I think I'm mostly thinking about it right now from a 3D perspective of, you know, Apple. You know, part of the overall ecosystem that Apple's trying to build with USDZ and with VR and with everything else is you got to make it easy to take an object and turn it into a 3D model. And this, you know, beyond just being able to do orientation fixes could be explosive in that area because it, just. Because the other thing, you know, here's the thing, you know how you know perfectly because you manufacture a million of these, you know exactly how the distance between those two and so that's a calibration that you don't have to make. You know what the lenses are, you know what the distance is, you know what the angles are. And that, that gives you an incredible amount of structure which makes the math a lot easier. And it's exciting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now you've got, and I agree with you, that's the sort of thing where a third party developer would immediately see the potential and would start hacking that like as soon as they get the hardware just to see if it'll work. That's got more excited.

[Andy Inatko]

Like the folks hacking the old Xbox controller, that was a little lidar controller, right. And they used it to scan things and everything else. This is like turning that dial the connect way. The connect to the. So the, the mi. The this. Those were only, those were only, you know, 80 mm apart. And, and on the same line you put them on a corner that you, that you know for sure and then you have higher resolution and, and more frame rate and everything else and then you add, you added a lidar to it. I don't know if Apple. Again, this is like me dreaming. What Apple, they have to put LIDAR.

[Leo Laporte]

On both cameras, right? Or would just Sensor one.

[Andy Inatko]

Just one. You just. If one. If one of them had. And they're already using that for facial ID to some degree. But there's a higher. I don't. It's a higher res one on the other side. So if they use. And. And a lot of the cost of that lidar has gone way down, you know, because they've used it in so many things. And so putting that lidar on that front facing camera and then giving you another camera, that. That's far. That's far away and to the side. Oh, boy, that would be interesting. I don't get excited about that hardware like that very often.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like, Alex, you've never made me so happy about having an M1 iPad that can probably serve to be replaced.

[Andy Inatko]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You'll be literally a position next. I don't.

[Andy Inatko]

I don't know if they're going to do it or not, but my. My pocket is on fire. My wallet is just smoldering. There's like flames coming out. Like what? Just.

[Alex Lindsay]

I got to start going.

[Leo Laporte]

Logan, for the. The. The screens you're using are so good. It's hard for me to use anything else.

[Andy Inatko]

And the funny thing is, is that, like, it's been really a hard press for me to get that. I have an M1. I have two M1s and do it for the screen. Yeah, I'm just kind of like, I'm very utilitarian about my iPads and I'm kind of like, you know, because I think part of it is if I want to watch a movie or I want to watch something, I put my headset on. So I'm not. I'm not that. And so I. So it's hard to get me to buy up iPads because I don't find a lot of the apps that I use need it. This would be the thing that would have me immediately like, oh, I got to. I have to buy it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to get them.

[Andy Inatko]

Have to get it. So anyway, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

So, new rumors about colors for the iPhone 17 Pro. Now, Macworld said that there was going to be a steel gray option, but Mai Jin Bu said orange, white, black, and dark blue. When asked about the gray color on X, he said the answer may be more complex than expected. Which tie that into another leaker, Setsuna Digital, who has had some success saying. Saying the iPhone 17 will have a special color scheme related to the liquid glass design of iOS 26. It will be white, but with different effects under different light.

[Alex Lindsay]

That would be nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of a pretty. Kind Of, I don't know, iridescent, like an abalone shell.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's interesting because if there is a glass cover on the back, which is something that we've been, we've been here, it's going to be a glass sandwich. You could have the layer, the metal layer underneath. It could have of a scheme that would interact with the layer on the top of it that could give that kind of like a beetle wing sort of effect. I'd love to see him, I'd love to see him go crazy. As I've said before, I'm a big fan of having one crazy option that almost, you think that almost nobody will pick. But it's just going to be, let's try to do this weirdest color yellow ever. Let's do a marble effect. Let's do a blueberry muffin effect.

[Jason Snell]

September 9, the orange one, I want, I'm excited. It might be bright, but it looks.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, the papaya one, it looks.

[Jason Snell]

To me like with the metallic finish in the mock up, it looks like you're. It's basically going to be like copper.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

It's going to be just kind of orangey but also very metallic. And that's not necessarily the most exciting but more exciting than they've done in the high end phones in a while. So. And, and I love the idea that there might be a concept color that is just like it's whatever color you think it might.

[Alex Lindsay]

Whatever was rejected for the original IMAX because I love how like in the later years of the IMAX they said what if we have sort of a Ponte Vecchi effect? Glass, Glass flowers in this plastic said, go for it.

[Jason Snell]

Sure. Flower power.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever floats your boat. There are pictures floating around of Juno Temple Brennan, Halt Hunt, Tanya Reynolds, Fay Marseille sitting around, eating, having a nice dinner at Denny's or somewhere.

[Jason Snell]

It's at a barbecue place in Kansas City. This is the, the first released shot from Ted Lasso season four.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

They, they've, they've signed everybody finally to their last contracts and there weren't holdouts. It was just timing for everybody. They're doing shooting Kansas City before they go to London and there's some details, tales about like broadly with the new season.

[Leo Laporte]

What will Hannah Waddingham do in kc?

[Jason Snell]

I think there'll be some humorous things that will happen.

[Leo Laporte]

There's kind of a mismatch.

[Alex Lindsay]

Impressive and spread joy is what she does.

[Jason Snell]

Ted Lasso basically a show that is essentially, you know, not even set foot in America. So to get a bunch of the characters to Come to Kansas City to find Ted and bring him back to London. I love, I love the potential for some fun there with those characters.

[Leo Laporte]

Characters. Nice. You know, normally at this time of the evening we would be playing the Vision Pro theme because we are in fact the number one Vision Pro podcast in the entire world.

[Jason Snell]

Bite us.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no Vision Pro news. You guys want to make some up too?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like at the when I'm finishing like what my contribution to the show Doc. If I don't have. I actually like look.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I couldn't find a damn thing.

[Leo Laporte]

This Andy does his professional rundown on the show, which I really appreciate.

[Jason Snell]

Andy, you'll be able to see it soon at Andy's website when he launches it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think, Andy, I should just stop doing bookmarking articles and let you take over? Maybe I should.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm going to be doing it every week. Whether you want to do it or whether you do it or not.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll put you in charge of the rundowns from now on.

[Alex Lindsay]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of duplication. I sometimes I have some oddball stories like this one. Apple Watch warns Iranians of iPhone spyware attacks ahead of Israelis. The Israeli conflict. Israel is of course the home of Pegasus, which is a zero click attack used by nation states against folks. And maybe they were warning Apple's in the past put up notifications for people saying a nation state is compromised your phone. So maybe they're doing that or we're.

[Alex Lindsay]

Doing that in Iran before shows us working. And it's also a good canary that nobody has ordered them to shut down that service yet. That yeah, I wonder how long it's going to take before some service says that you're not allowed to blow our operations in any way, shape or form and if there will be any blowback from Apple to say no, no, we were surveilling those people for a reason because they are against you, our government. And what are you doing? What are you trying to do defining our government?

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson took special note of Apple's term for this kind of spyware. They call it mercenary spyware, which is I think kind of a loaded term. Like these are companies that are getting paid to break into your phone. Apple's recommendation if you get this threat notification to turn on advanced data protection protection.

[Andy Inatko]

And I think that that just shows that Apple's not taking sides. They have to, you know, if they set up a set of rules that say, hey, if you're doing this. And we see, and we see that what's happening. We're going to tell you. They're going to tell everybody, you know, that that's actually what's happening there.

[Jason Snell]

Apple is opposed to having its software subverted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And turned into. And owned. Right. Like they're against that. Doesn't matter who it is. It's like if you're, if you're a user of an Apple product and you got broken into and that their, their OS got busted, you know, they're not happy about it. It doesn't matter who the breaker inner is. And this is the, you know, that's the, that's why the NSA doesn't report bugs to Apple. Right. Like, because Apple's interest is in closing those loopholes. That's no matter who it is.

[Alex Lindsay]

And that's, that's a good point. Because it's a key distinction. They have no problem with making pulling apps from the App Store in a certain country because no, they, the government wants, doesn't want people to have the ability to connect their iPhone to services without. Through, through encryption. However, if you try to compromise the phone itself, then you have a problem with Apple and that's where Apple hopefully will continue to not let people cross that line.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, this has nothing to do with Apple. But I thought it was interesting. Today is the second shortest day in history because the planet is rotating faster and faster. Don't worry, it's not that much faster. What was the shortest day in shortest day was July 20th.

[Andy Inatko]

So it's continuing, it's going to keep on going.

[Leo Laporte]

It's continuing to get shorter and shorter by a millisecond. I mean, you're not going to notice it. But they say, you know, pretty soon we're going to have to do a leap second backwards. I'm sorry. The shortest day ever measured was July 5, 2024. Last year at this time, it was 1.66 milliseconds shorter because the Earth's rotation had sped up by that much. Looking ahead to this year, scientists predicted July 9, July 22 and August 5 could be the shortest day of the year. July 10 took the lead as the shortest day so far in 2025. Today it is expected that we will have the shortest day. Second shortest day in recorded history.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes, but who, who gets it? So if it's shorter, that time had to go somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Where does it go?

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't want to know.

[Jason Snell]

Who.

[Leo Laporte]

Where does it go?

[Alex Lindsay]

Lewis has that extra 14 seconds.

[Leo Laporte]

You can blame the moon for this, by the way, because the moon.

[Alex Lindsay]

Someone should do something about that. That Moon needs to be taken down a peg, if you ask me.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want more details, space.com help has the. Has the full story. I am not an astronomer, but the primary culprit, they say, has been tidal friction from the moon, which has caused the Moon to gradually move farther away from the Earth. As it moves away, the Moon saps. Saps, I tell you, the Earth's rotational energy causing the rotation to slow and the days to lengthen. However, why the sudden reverse? Well, I don't know. Some reason. Reason they're not lengthening. But, you know, the good news is maybe they'll. Maybe they'll lengthen and we'll get our millisecond back. Who knows? It's all a great mystery. Nature is amazing. I think that is everything I have here. And since you guys couldn't come up with a Vision Pro story, we won't play the Vision Pro jingle making this no longer. Longer.

[Andy Inatko]

No, no, I have the. The cameras are. The cameras are starting to roll out.

[Leo Laporte]

Play the jingle. I am starting to get hate mail from people and say, don't play that crappy jingle.

[Jason Snell]

I love it.

[Andy Inatko]

It's fun. Yeah. So. So the cameras are starting to hit the wild. There's some unboxings that. Have one yet? Yeah, the new Black Magic. I don't have one yet. Not that I'm bitter, but are you on the list? I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

I have a strong suspicion that Alex is on the list.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm on the list. I'm on the list, man. Look, check. Check the list.

[Andy Inatko]

Super excited about whenever that. That occurs. But. But the. The new. Not. Not the cine there. That's a different one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's this one on the right. Cine immersive.

[Andy Inatko]

So we're starting to see unboxings there. And Hugh Howe, who's kind of known for a lot of the stuff, has done some stuff. He went to the Santa Monica Pier. There's some stuff that I can't download on my headset for some reason. Not working. And this is what we're going to see. People are gonna make stuff up. They're gonna put it up there for people to download, and then it's gonna be broken. So cute.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like it's got a little face. You should put googly eyes on the lenses. It's so cute.

[Andy Inatko]

Exactly. So we should start to see. I guess what I would say is that the news is that this is. We've talked about. Like, when is it gonna get released? Well, it's starting to come out of the factory. Typically, the way it works with blackmagic is that things come out very slowly at the very beginning, and then once everything's tooled and the machine's going, they can produce as many as they need to. And so I think that we're going to see, you know, more and more of these cameras, more and more test shoots. So it, it, you know, it's not going to be immediate. It's not like September is going to be a great month for Immersive. But I think that as we go towards the end of the year, you know, December, January, February, we're going to start to see some really interesting new uses for the camera, new uses for the headset that we haven't seen before.

[Leo Laporte]

And new content, which would be really cool. Good.

[Andy Inatko]

And lots of new content, you know, and again, Apple, I think, is working very closely with blackmagic. You know, the other thing to keep tracking is also Apple's paying, you know, some of the stuff that they showed at WWDC about the Apple spatial audio format, the Apple positional audio codec. These are things that, these are, these are game changers. You know, they're thinking about very high ambisonic orders. So, you know, fifth ambisonic order order, that type of thing where you have lots and lots of, of detail, you know, in these surround spheres. And so, so it's going to be really interesting to see both in the audio area as well as the video area where some of these start to come together. But we're going to see, I think it's going to start speeding up. You know, we've been watching this kind of go very slowly and wonder when it's going to happen. But the next six months should be pretty interesting when it comes to content for the headset.

[Leo Laporte]

Dr. Dew, who has been updating all the devices as the show goes on, has been updating his Vision Pro with Beta 4. He says it's booting now. My God, this is a long boot. Not the usual 37 seconds.

[Andy Inatko]

37 seconds. I never know what it is. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'll tell you why he knows. Apparently he's got a meeting and he's going to do it in the Vision Pro.

[Andy Inatko]

So there we go.

[Leo Laporte]

He's hurting.

[Alex Lindsay]

New beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you installed the. Have you installed the beta? Anybody?

[Andy Inatko]

I was just traveling, so I haven't been able to get back Mac and.

[Jason Snell]

Get it installed, but I was too busy with the Mac and the iPad.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've got the iPhone just to just finish updating. I am blown away by the. No, I don't know anything.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm waiting for public. I want public. New Persona Update screen again. Says the Doctor. The good doctor. All right, that's your Vision Pro segment. We have maintained our reputation.

[Andy Inatko]

We're done talking.

[Leo Laporte]

The Vision world's leading Vision World leading Vision Pro podcast. This, my friends, is why you're in Club Twit. You, this is the reason you joined, is so that you can support fine content like this. We do thank our Club Twit members. You make a big difference. Thank you for all you do for us. Club Twit pays now 25% of our operating costs. That's because, you know, as much as we love our advertisers, they don't cover the full bill. That's why we started the club almost five years ago. And, and it was to kind of make up the difference. And you've done that. You've really done that. So we try to give you a reason to join. We appreciate the support. It's fantastic. You get ad free versions of all the shows. Because I've never been. I always hate it when they charge you and still show you ads. We don't do that. You wouldn't even get this plug if you were a member unless you wanted to. You know, if you want to, you. You can. What else? We give you all these special events and programming we do. We give you video for all the shows that we. We do in audio only to the public, like this Week in Space and Home Theater Geeks. Hands on Mac. I'm sorry, it's now Hands on Apple, by the way, because Michael Micah does all the Apple stuff. Hands on Windows with Paul Thurai. You get the video for that. You also get special events in the Club Twit Discord. Oh, Discord's another benefit coming up Thursday. Richard Campbell has all the Paul parts. He's going to build his new PC. We're excited about that. You can watch the Home Theater Geeks recording on Monday, July 28th. Our AI user group. It's the first Friday of every month. It'll be August 1st. That's been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot about Hands On AI with that. Hands on Tech Records monthly in the Discord iOS today. Stacy's Book Club's coming up on the 8th. This is how youw Lose the Time or Read that book, by the way. Jason agrees. It's really an excellent book. You know what I read, Jason? I've just finished. They mention in how you Lose the Time War a children's book called Travel Light. And I thought, well, I should read this. They really seem to like it. Both. Both Red and Blue really seem to like it. And it's a great book. It came out in the 50s. I wish I'd known about it. I would have read it to my kids. Anyway, we'll talk about that August 8th, 1pm Pacific right after that. Photo time with Chris March Markwart the made by Google Pixel 10 announcements are August 20th. We'll stream that as we always do in the club. Only Micah's crafting corner. Anyway, these are all reasons to join the club. Please visit Twitter TV Club TWiT and do us a solid. Support the programming you love. Now, if you hate our programming, don't join the club. That's fine.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or join the club just to spite us. That'll teach us a lesson.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And here is the president of Club Twit flying in on string. Thank you. Thank you for that. Dolfo Munoz. Or is that pretty fly for us? This guy? Is that your real name? Have I just outed you? Twit. TV Club Twit. Thanks in advance. This episode is brought to you by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I love hearing those those words. For 35 years the electronic Frontier foundation has been fighting to make sure when you go online, your rights go with you. I'm a proud member. You should too. I also listen to their great podcast how to Fix the Internet. I don't know how I would sum up what the EFF does. It does so much. Their lawyers protect security researchers from companies that don't want them to do the research. EFF's technologists develop open source software to combat surveillance. Have you used privacy Badger use and their activists push companies to build tools that work for you, not against you. The EFF's podcast How to Fix the Internet has some of the best guests ever. People from like minded groups including the Digital Defense Fund, the Tor Project, the Freedom of Press foundation, leading thinkers in post quantum crypto, AI neurotechnology. And with every guest they asked the question what does the world look like if we get this right? Visit eff.org podcast podcast and listen to how to Fix the Internet. And by the way, join the eff. I'm a member. You should be too. Thank you eff. Time for our picks of the week. Andy and Iko. Why don't you kick things off?

[Alex Lindsay]

Mine is kind of esoteric. It's something I have absolutely no intention of buying. But I love the fact that it exists. I don't have it in the. I don't have it in my Picks. I do have it in the. In the showbiz section of the doc they're making. There's a Kickstarter to manufacture the keyboards from Severance.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you gonna buy an MDR keyboard?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh my God. Well no, because I'll wait to explain how much they cost. But that's probably the reason why I'm not gonna get it. But. Oh my God, are they doing it seems like they're doing this right? It seems to be like a 100% accurate reproduction.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of the key keyboard. It's not like, hey, we 3D printed some stuff and we like we did. No, it's made out of like heavy aluminum. It is a murder weapon grade like construction. It is accurate to the key layout of the show, which means it has no escape, no control, no option. So that but else have. Does have.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need those. You need the trackball though. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

But does does have a two button track ball. But the other cool thing about it is is that there are extra layouts that you can use. So you can choose a layout that is. They call it the. There's the any layout which is the 100% reproduction. There is the Audi layout which is a standard like compact keyboard which has all like the function keys. So you can actually use it as a keyboard and tickling my nerve endings. The dasher layout. Remember that this terminal was based on a Data General Dasher D2 Terminal. So if you want like the keyboard of the original Dasher D2.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

You can get that as well. It's my understanding of it is that like these are actually like magnetically swappable. So it's not as though you have to pick one and go oh, okay, okay. So $10 will get you on the list. I don't think they've actually launched yet, but is the Kickstarter pages is open. If you're an early adopter. If you're an early adopter, get on the ground floor 599. Then that will go up $50. Then another $50 for people come in late to $699 for the tier two.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes my hall effect Wu Ting He 60 seem cheap. And it was not cheap.

[Alex Lindsay]

$899 retail, they're saying. And oh again it's a choice for people who really love the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And again that's the sort of thing where if I saw that. If I saw a dash or keyboard at the MIT 4 Flea Market, I would not care that I can't use it with anything. I would just want to own it because it looks like a million freaking dollars. It does have like the custom keep keycaps for the any keyboard. So I just appreciate the fact that okay, the price is really out there but I appreciate the fact that they didn't decide to go with go just halfway with it where they said well, we got to know. We contacted a factory in China that could give us colored keycaps and could do us a run of rounded keyboards. It's like no, it's either the real thing or. Or it's not. And Jason's holding up that beautiful custom keyboard with that same color scheme.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you can get.

[Leo Laporte]

And the Commodore logo.

[Jason Snell]

No, that's the six colors.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, six colors, six colors logo. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Jason Snell]

This is. Yeah, you can. You can get dasher style [e-mail] which is what I did. And I put it on this Keychron Q1.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jason Snell]

And it's close enough for me. But it is definitely. I got it because these are the severe keys. It's really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually replaced my keychron Q because I wasn't very accurate with it for some reason. That's when I got the wooting 80 he which is not cheap but it's got hall effect switches and really nice keyboards.

[Alex Lindsay]

Keyboards are like shoes or sneakers. You should put money into them because you are working with this all day long and you have no idea what it's cost costing you to have making you do with something that's cheap and hurting your hands or making you Ms. Key.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I just. Yeah, that's the was the issue is I was inaccurate with the and I thought the key was great. I loved how it felt.

[Andy Inatko]

But the worst part is it's such a hole that you just keep digging yourself into.

[Leo Laporte]

You know like I got better.

[Andy Inatko]

I started getting the new fee boards and and so then I got the newfie boards. But then I started. I had the red switches on one of them and then I bought one with. And I was like I'll try the moss switches. And I like the moss so much better that now I look back at the red switches and I'm like I used to not think about keyboards and now I'm like I don't like the red switch as much as the moss switch.

[Alex Lindsay]

I still have my code keyboard. I'm pleased to say that the backlighting on the D key keeps flickering on and off. That means I've been working very, very hard. You want the beat up cigarette stained food crumbs everywhere. That shows that whoever has to clean out your house after you die knows. Okay, this guy.

[Leo Laporte]

This guy worked for a living.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. He was a big working class man. Man with workingclass hands. Calloused from lots of typing.

[Leo Laporte]

This. This wu ting is. I got the zinc body. So it's really heavy.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh, man.

[Leo Laporte]

But it is a very, very. I'm with hall effect switches. It's really nice. They're really. It's a nice keyboard and it's not as clickety clackety as the Keychron was. But again, everybody's got their own.

[Andy Inatko]

You know, I'm always trying to find the quietest one that I can find, and I just have a hard time. Silent.

[Leo Laporte]

The hall effects aren't too loud. Loud there.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. I don't want it to be like. I just wanted to be. And I would buy glass if I could, but the glass ones are a very hard to find and be really expensive. They're like 300.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then I also. I also use here, because we're on the air, I have to use a super quiet keyboard. That's the Logitech keyboard. And actually this is a nice little keyboard. And it's pretty much silent, even though quiet. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. And I use it with the MX mouse and everything. This is.

[Andy Inatko]

Which one is that?

[Alex Lindsay]

Logitech?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the Logitech MX keys mini. And one of the advantages, it supports three different Bluetooth connections, so you can have three computers.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think I have an earlier. I think I have an earlier version of that. Yeah, they also last really nicely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a. It's a. It's a nice keyboard. It's battery powered, but I keep it plugged in because, you know, I don't want it to die in the middle of the show. All right, your turn, Alex. Lindsay, A. I'm going back to an.

[Andy Inatko]

Old one that I did many years ago that I'm still using. And I just realized I saw, like, I got my dad on it years and years ago, and I saw my, you know, vacationing with my family last week, and he pulled out his iPad and went into Flipboard and started reading the news. And I realized he's still. He's still doing that, and I'm still, like, I still. It's like one of the news thing. One of the news apps that I use, and I. The reason I'm. The reason I'm doing. And I think I talked about it before, before is that I just find it so pleasurable and it seems like it shouldn't matter it shouldn't matter that I just scroll up or whatever. There is something about the flip experience and, and when they, when they took it away for a while, Flipboard had a whole bunch of articles on every page, like when you first get into it. And I, I stopped using it for years, years. And so, and I came back to it like, oh, am I going to get rid of this or not? And I popped it back up and they had some somehow gotten to their senses because it's the flip that makes it work and I don't know what it is, but I enjoy the Flipboard. There's things I don't like. I think they run too many ads. I think they do a bunch of other things that are there. But I think as a UI person, like thinking about UI and if you're looking at it, I think it's worth getting Flipboard because there's something that draws it to me that, that I don't find as pleasurable in any of the other news apps that I use. There's something about the flip function that shouldn't matter. It's very, you know, old fashioned and I don't like, I don't like the page curl. Like I just want to make sure it's clear. Like it's the, whatever they did to get the flip function to do the flip thing exactly the way the Flipboard does it, I really enjoy and I don't like almost anybody else's solution and I've just realized that, so I'm more of like a. Because again, there's things about it that make me a little crazy. You know, the amount of ads, the way the ads get put in. Anything other than one article per page drives me a little nutty. Like, I don't want to say, see, I like the, I like the experience. And if someone came, if Flipboard had a version that I could pay for that never had any ads that only had one article per page, I'd pay for that, you know, because it's just, there's something about it that I really enjoy going through it and being able to, you know, subscribe to different feeds and so on and so forth.

[Alex Lindsay]

But anyway, 100%, there's something, it's something about the way that you go from, you move from one article to the other in Flipboard that I don't think any other app like it has really, really matched. And it opened my eyes to how important that simple feature actually is. It's a pleasure to actually flip through it.

[Andy Inatko]

It's an amazing thing we talked about That a little. With Hestan, you know, one little problem. And it's amazing how you can build a product and it doesn't take very much to have people just stop using it. You know, like Flipboard is a good example. They experimented with. You know, everybody else was doing, like, many articles on one page, and so they experimented with that. And I literally. Years went by before I went back to them.

[Leo Laporte]

So we had the creator of Flipboard, Mike McHugh, on intelligent machines, not so long ago. He has a new product you should probably look at at called Surf, which is kind of. The idea is it's like Flipboard, but you get it from. Remember Flipboard's original premise was it was all Twitter. Right. And it's gone way beyond that. Yeah, but so Surf is still kind of that idea. Blue Sky, Mastodon Threads. Flipboard is on it. YouTube.

[Andy Inatko]

I mean, the funny thing about Flipboard is what I'm mostly reading are things that are functionally. What I want is rss.

[Leo Laporte]

Is rss. Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

But I want that very specific flip function. And if I could just have a pure flip function that Flipboard has with just rss, I don't really need to see people's tweets. I mean, I can.

[Leo Laporte]

You can put RSS in this, too, and you can use it as an RSS reader exclusively. You get control of it. Just try it. It's free.

[Andy Inatko]

I'm gonna try it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Surf Social. Surf Social. And, you know, I think it's kind of. Look, Mike is really smart and, you know, he's done some really interesting stuff. I think Flipboard is a really good example of this. I think he thinks of this as his next thing. He was on Intelligent Machines about a month ago. I'll see May 7th on Intelligent Machines 18. We talked to him. I really like Mike, but I like Flipboard. I think you're right. Flipboard. It's funny how it's persisted after all this time. Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, really quick one. There's a great app that's been out for a few years on iOS and iPados called longplay, which is an album player instead of a music shuffler. It is aggressively about playing albums. You can also do playlists. Mac version just came out. It's pretty great. You can play music and albums and playlists and queue them up and.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. So you're playing it through Apple Music, but it's making it an album? Is that the idea?

[Jason Snell]

It was. So the idea here is that it'll read your Apple Music library. But it's its own standalone app and it has an interface where it shows you album covers and you can click on them, but everything is done atomically per album. So you listen to an album straight through. You don't shuffle it, you can skip tracks unless you put it hysterical in hard mode, in which case you can't. If you queue up another album, you queue up the next album. And on the Mac, this version, it supports AppleScript, it supports Shortcuts, and it supports MCP. So you can actually launch Claude on the Mac and say, I'd like to listen. This is what I did. The first thing I did is I said, I'd like to listen to a classic album from a duo or group from the 80s that's do a pop album. And it was like, great, I'm playing Purple Rain. Here are some other albums in that meet your criteria that are in your collection. Would you like me to play anything else? And I was like, sure, Queue up Songs from the Big Chair by Tears for Fears afterward. And it's like, great, I'll do that. And because MCP is basically the scripting language exposed for LLMs to use, you could actually have an LLM. Use the power of an LLM and knowledge of your library in control of this app to do things like recommend or create a collection for you or whatever. So it's very automatable and it's kind of fun. There are moments when I just want to listen to an album straight through and I don't want to shuffle through a radio station or a playlist. And long play, it's really nice player, it's really well designed, you got the controls and a piece of album art. And I think I said this a few years ago and it's quoted on their website now, but I say with great authority that Steve Jobs would have loved to this app, because Steve Jobs loved album art. And that is sort of the center of the UI of this. So if you like listening to albums straight through or even playlists that you've made straight through, this is what will do that. Long play and some really innovative automation stuff that I think points the way to the future of a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Desktop apps, this would be a good day to listen to Black Sabbath from beginning to end. How about that?

[Jason Snell]

Pick a classic album or pick Ozzy Osbourne's solo album, one that has Crazy Train on it, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, it's funny, he really. As great as he was in Sabbath, he was even better as a solo artist. It was kind of.

[Jason Snell]

You played Straight through it. It really takes me back to. I mean, I realized that, you know, as a. I'm of a certain age where actually the CD era really means a lot to me. And that was literally, you press play and then, yeah, the whole thing unfolds till the end. And yeah, you could skip and stuff, but. And there are albums that are built that way. Not everybody listens to music like this. And I don't even listen to music like this. Excl. But it is fun to say, you know, I'm going to just sit here and I'm going to play that one start to finish.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you don't own the whole album, though, like, if you didn't support.

[Jason Snell]

Apple Music, if it's in your library, it will play it for you. It supports Apple Music in your library.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, I. I mean, I didn't. I never bought Blizzard of Oz, but it. But I could get it on Apple Music.

[Jason Snell]

You just added an Apple music and then it's a long.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, then it counts.

[Jason Snell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to do that tonight.

[Jason Snell]

And it does some other stuff. It scrabbles to Last FM and stuff like that. It's got a bunch of other people still. Scrabble people. They're scrabbling. They're out there every day. They're scrabbling.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, I. I follow you, of course, so I don't need to scrabble you.599 for the app and 25.25 bucks straight.

[Jason Snell]

Up, no subscription for the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

I might do that because just get it on the Mac because it's like on the Mac.

[Jason Snell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Vision Pro.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. The Mac one. Adrian, who wrote this, has done a lot of work and it's taken him a few years and there's still some bugs that, like, there's one bug that he's been fighting that is finally fixed in Tahoe that allows him to do something he couldn't do up to now. But it's great that it's out and I was just using it earlier today to listen to IO by Peter Gabriel, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that. One of my favorite albums.

[Jason Snell]

I know so.

[Leo Laporte]

And it has to be listened to as an album. I agree with you.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. It's a journey you can take and not always in that mood, but if you're in that mood a lot. Yeah, great. Just. And also really nice to see a good new Mac app. And it. And it feels like a Matt Gappin, the fact that he had to find like the gray heads of the Apple community to tell him how to do AppleScript because he wanted to have it be integrated with Alfred, I think. And so AppleScript he had to do. And then he did shortcuts. So it's past, present, and then with mcp to be able to have an LLM control it. That's the future. So, yeah, really interesting stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Norman Maslov loves it. You're right. You love it Maslov, don't you? He said, what a concept, listening to a whole album. Album. He's our, our vinyl expert. That's all he ever listens to.

[Jason Snell]

And that's good. So it feels like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Feels, you know, with that. And the album art stays up and it's, it's really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna have an Oz Fest in my house tonight in Oz. Yeah. Thank you so much. Jason snell [e-mail] Read all his good stuff. His podcasts [e-mail] Jason Hope to have.

[Jason Snell]

Thousands of words about the public beta out. Whenever that happens, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

You started it, didn't you? Just pretending that this beta that you have now is the public beta and you're starting it.

[Jason Snell]

I've been writing about for the public beta release for like three weeks now. I would really like it to be done right. I've got them ready to go. Honestly, I just have to check them against the latest beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Vanch and I at Discord wants to know Dark side mix or the Bright.

[Jason Snell]

Side mixed to the Bright side mix today? Because I'm in that mood, Leo. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like the Bright side side mix.

[Jason Snell]

It's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

You get your choice.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Yeah, they're pretty close.

[Leo Laporte]

Peter Gabriel's amazing. I wish he would tour on this. He was going to, but I don't, I, I don't think he did. Mr. Alexander Lindsay is the man. So many things at Office Hours Global.

[Andy Inatko]

We're answering questions. We, we got up this morning, we answered more questions.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a never ending supply, isn't it, Cameron?

[Alex Lindsay]

At that coal seam day in, day.

[Andy Inatko]

Out, we've gone over, we're, we're well over 55,000 questions. And we keep thinking that someday we're going to come and there's not going to be any questions. And we're like, we got to the end, there's no more. Everybody knows all the things and just hasn't happened yet. So every morning 7am we get up again and start digging, seeing if we can find the core. We haven't found it yet. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Office Hours Global on the web, Office hours global on YouTube you can also join in if you want. It's a. It's a giant zoom call every morning.

[Andy Inatko]

You know, it's. It's so much fun. The panelists are like their own little group. Group of folks that are willing to get up and answer questions. And one of the things is it's the easiest place to look good because you only have to.

[Leo Laporte]

We.

[Andy Inatko]

We very carefully know how to. Who gets to answer what. So it's a big panel. You know, I think we had eight or ten people on today. And. And people just raise their hand on the ones that they can answer. So they don't. You only have to.

[Leo Laporte]

You never look dumb.

[Andy Inatko]

You never look dumb. You always. You always.

[Leo Laporte]

Unlike me on my radio show where it was just me making.

[Andy Inatko]

That's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I get to choose the question questions just like, I don't know.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, exactly. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

And I didn't even have AI in the day, back in the day to help me. Yeah. Thank God I had Google. That's all I can say. Office hours Global. Andy Inaco.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I'm. The thing is, now that I'm. Now that I'm this close, I keep finding things that, like, need to be fixed. Like, I gotta. I'm gonna. I'm gonna be putting something in. In the discord. So the last thing was I discovered that the COVID picture that I was using because it's my favorite picture of myself ever, I can't use it anymore because it's a picture of myself at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and I look outstanding, but I really, really shouldn't. Now, me and the White House has.

[Leo Laporte]

A connotation you perhaps don't want to perpetuate.

[Alex Lindsay]

So it's not starting all over again by any means. It's just like, okay, so now that I've taken that down, I'll put something else in its place. I'm sorry that I keep saying it's very, very close. It's just that again, every. We're now at the point where like, okay, so I just got to do this, and then I can open up. Ooh, right. But that's going to fail. Like, ah, damn it. Okay, so I'll do that. And unfortunately, it's like it's juggling other things too that have to be done as well. And I would feel like if I have a deadline to other people to deliver stuff, that has to take priority. And then I'm like, but what time is. I'm. Anyway, I'm sorry. This is not a scam. I am actually working. I am actually going to be opening this site very, very soon. But we're fortunately now at the point where it's like little things like this, not big things that need to be solved.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I just launched Long Play. I like this. This is showing all my album covers.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Yeah, it's really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty cool.

[Jason Snell]

And you can sort them. You can have like the. Your favorites bigger or recents Bigger. And you can sort them by different ways. Like recent or neglected or color or like. It's pretty wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. You know, if you're going to listen to Frampton Comes Alive, you got to start at the beginning.

[Jason Snell]

You'll lose track otherwise. Yeah, it's very confusing. It's not much of a live. A live show if it's shuffled.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, those shuffle live shows. Good Lord, man. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you especially to our wonderful panelists who join us every Tuesday. You guys rock. Jason Snell, sixcolors.com Andy and not go at I have no idea how to spell it.com no I h n A T K O and Office Hours Global's Alex Lindsay. We do the show every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. Eastern, 1800 UTC. If you would like to join us, we'd love to have you. All you got to do is go to YouTube or Twitch or X.com or Facebook or LinkedIn or Kick or TikTok. We stream on all those platforms. And of course, if you're in the club, you got that special behind the Velvet Rope access in the club. Twit Discord. After the fact, you could still watch the show, just, you know, not interactively. You listen on demand, as they say. There's a copy of the show, audio or more video at TWiT TV, MBW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. There's also a, you know, a subscription you could for free in your favorite podcast player, Pocket Casts, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, whatever you like, subscribe. You'll get it automatically. Then the minute it's done, please leave us a nice review if you will. It helps us spread the the word about the best darn Vision Pro show in the whole wide world. You know what I like about this long play? I'm discovering albums because I see the album, I go, oh, I forgot about that. I love that.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. One of the modes that you can sort by is called neglect. And it puts albums of yours you haven't played in a while up toward the top. It's really smart. Yeah. There's a bunch of great stuff in it. Check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

This is good.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's amazing when you go away from playlists or individual tracks and you start saying, no, I'm going to listen to this entire album from track, track one to track end.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a big difference.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like, wow. I had no idea that this was more than just two of the songs I like. This is actually a good album.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Thank you to our club members. You guys rock Twitter tv, Club Twit. Keep your membership up to date. It makes a big difference to us. Thanks to everybody for being here. We'll see you next week. But I am sorry to say it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you it's time to get back to work because break time is over. My button get your tech news exactly how you want it with TWiT TV. Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent delivers quick hit coverage at exclusive journalist interviews, giving you the inside scoop on breaking tech stories in under an hour. Now for deeper dives, I hope you'll join me, Leo Laporte and a great panel of tech industry experts. That's every Sunday with this Week in Tech. We'll break down everything from AI breakthroughs to privacy concerns to cybersecurity alerts in the tech world's longest running and most trusted tech news roundtable. So efficient or in depth, the choice is yours. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts and head on over to our website, Twitter TV for even more independent tech journalism.