MacBreak Weekly 983: The Saggy Quarter

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 983: The Saggy Quarter
Released on July 29, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell

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1. Introduction to Public Betas and Initial Impressions

The episode kicks off with the hosts discussing the arrival of macOS Tahoe and iOS 26 public betas. Leo Laporte shares his enthusiasm about installing the betas on his Macs and iPads, although he's holding off on the iPhone due to concerns over device performance.

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte [04:17]: "I'm torn between the devil on my right shoulder and the angel on my left. But you know what I decided? Oh, heck, just do it."

2. iOS 26 Multitasking Enhancements on iPad

The conversation delves into Apple's revamped multitasking features in iOS 26, particularly the shift towards a Mac-like tiling window system on the iPad. While some appreciate the enhanced productivity tools, others, including developer Harry McCracken, express concerns about losing unique iPad experiences like Slide Over.

Notable Quote:
Andy Ihnatko [09:26]: "Slide Over was like the easy little basic multitasking that you could do. And now that they've got this, they don't need it anymore."

3. macOS Tahoe Public Beta: Features and Critiques

Andy and Jason provide an in-depth analysis of macOS Tahoe’s new features, highlighting improvements in Spotlight search, Automation via Shortcuts, and the introduction of a more flexible Control Center. However, they critique the implementation of Liquid Glass, describing it as "amateurish" and "half-finished."

Notable Quote:
Andy Ihnatko [15:03]: "I turned off Lunch Bar, which I've used for 15 years and I still haven't gone back."

4. Apple's Enhanced AppleCare One: A Multi-Device Warranty Solution

Leo introduces Apple's new AppleCare One program, designed for users with multiple Apple devices. The hosts discuss its cost-effectiveness, especially for those who frequently use AppleCare+ services. While Leo considers it beneficial, others like Alex remain skeptical, emphasizing the need to evaluate based on individual device usage.

Notable Quote:
Andy Ihnatko [71:59]: "If you're a regular AppleCare person, you know, you got to look at this because it will probably save you money."

5. Privacy Enhancements in iOS 26 and Political Implications

A significant portion of the discussion centers around iOS 26’s new feature that filters out texts from unknown senders by default. This change has stirred controversy among political campaigns, particularly Senate Republicans, who fear it could impede their outreach efforts.

Notable Quote:
Jason Snell [40:34]: "It's like, oh, dear, what are you going to do?"

6. Vision Pro Segment: Excitement and Future Prospects

The hosts briefly touch upon Apple's Vision Pro, expressing excitement about its potential. However, there are reservations about how it will integrate with existing workflows and the centrality of the smartphone in Apple’s ecosystem.

Notable Quote:
Andy Ihnatko [82:49]: "I think the smartphone is too good. I think the smartphone is such a great product that it will be very hard to get more likely to build accessories on top of it than to kick it to the curb for a decade at least, if not more."

7. Rush Drummer Tribute and Copyright Discussions

In a heartfelt segment, the hosts pay tribute to Rush drummer Neil Peart, discussing his contributions and the band’s legacy. This segues into a discussion about copyright issues, particularly how YouTube’s Content ID system mistakenly flagged public domain works, leading to frustrations among creators.

Notable Quote:
Jason Snell [131:40]: "I have an enormous amount of respect for Mike Seymour. We've been friends for a long time."

8. Recommendations and Pick of the Week

Andy recommends the Rocket app for seamless emoji insertion, replacing the functionality he previously relied on with LaunchBar. Leo shares his positive experience with Perplexity’s new AppleScript integration, enhancing productivity through automation.

Notable Quote:
Andy Ihnatko [126:42]: "Rocket is the answer."

9. Closing Remarks and Community Shout-Outs

The episode concludes with the hosts acknowledging their club members, promoting upcoming events, and encouraging listeners to join the TwitTV Club for exclusive benefits. They also tease upcoming segments, including deep dives into Apple’s financials and new software features.

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte [124:07]: "If you're looking for ways to upcharge, I need to know a little bit more about how much they're spending for whatever they're using for compute."

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Key Takeaways

• AppleCare One: A new multi-device warranty program that could offer savings for users with multiple Apple devices. Evaluation based on individual needs is recommended.
• iOS 26 Multitasking: Enhanced window tiling on iPad brings Mac-like productivity but may sacrifice unique iPad experiences.
• macOS Tahoe: Introduces powerful tools for power users but faces criticism for inconsistent UI elements like Liquid Glass.
• Privacy Features: iOS 26’s default filtering of unknown texts strengthens user privacy but poses challenges for political campaign communications.
• Vision Pro: Promises innovation but its integration with current Apple products and workflows remains uncertain.
• Community Tools: Apps like Rocket and Perplexity are highlighted for enhancing productivity through seamless integrations and automation.

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This episode of MacBreak Weekly offers a comprehensive overview of Apple’s latest software updates and services, blending technical insights with community-focused discussions. Whether you're a power user evaluating AppleCare One or a developer interested in the nuances of Liquid Glass, this episode provides valuable perspectives to navigate the evolving Apple ecosystem.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are in the house. We have lots to talk about, some really cool information for you about Apple's new warranty program and why if you have multiple Apple devices, it might be a good deal. Apple takes its thumb off the scales for developers, at least in some respects. And then we're going to take a look at all the 26s. The public betas are here and we've got an analysis from Jason Snell, Andy Inocco and Alex Lindsey. Mac Break Weekly is next. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWIT. This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 983. Recorded Tuesday, July 29, 2025. The Saggy Quarter. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we get together and chat about Apple with Jason Snell, who's in the foothills I love.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, I'm not. I'm at home. What are you talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean he's at home in the foothills.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm using the Orange Mic. The Orange Mic is a tell that I'm not my usual spot. Hey, yeah, let's talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. You have color coded locations.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's Doc Rock, right? Doc Rock, he has his little dock pops that he sells and I got two. I got one for my, my setup in my office which is a SM7B and it's blue and I got a. I got for my MV7 that's in usually in the. The room in the back of the house that I use in the winter. I have an orange one and I'm traveling and the fact that my background looks like my office and I've got an orange Doc Pop on here is a, it's a giveaway that it's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Why purple is in the garage. Blue, blue in the blue and orange is in the foothills elsewhere or elsewhere.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Else Foothills or just in the back of my house because I'm cold. Right, One of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Okay, let's talk about apples.

[Leo Laporte]

Apples and oranges, not oranges. Also Here, Andy Anako. Anako.com. hello, Andrew.

[Jason Snell]

Hey there. Hi there. Ho there.

[Leo Laporte]

How are you today?

[Jason Snell]

Oh goodness. I almost did the show from my home office today because I.

[Leo Laporte]

How exciting.

[Jason Snell]

Well, because like I have one room with an open window in my house and if it's so hot that I can feel the heat radiating in from that open window, it's like, why am I trying to Even like walk 3/4 of a mile to a mile today? It is really, really nasty.

[Leo Laporte]

The library is like those old movie Theaters, they have a big banner outside with letters on dicyles saying it's come on in, it's cold inside.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, I packed like the nice like black, black golf shorts where I look professional, but I'm like, I'm still too hot to wear any layers over the.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you not wearing pants right now?

[Jason Snell]

I am wearing shorts.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jason Snell]

I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jason Snell]

And even, and even that like, I don't. I tried. I. I don't wear shorts unless it's super hot outside because I'm dumpy looking enough. I think that I will look like a bum if I don't like, you know, if, if I don't dress up a little bit. So I have one nice pair of shorts and I'm wearing them today. I'm sorry.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's nice.

[Jason Snell]

I did. I do. I do have a pair of.

[Leo Laporte]

I must say, you have a T shirt with a, with a breast pocket, which is pretty interesting.

[Jason Snell]

This is one of those super like, you know, it's made out of. It's basically made out of plastic.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

So it's like. So it's like wearing nothing at all. But like you have to wash them three times a day because they really, really trap the. You know what.

[Alex Lindsay]

Anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Hi. Wow. This ended up being a little more sartorial information.

[Jason Snell]

Just one kitty. That's all I'm asking for today.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex Lindsay is here we are nice and cool in beautiful Northern California cargo shorts for me. That's.

[Alex Lindsay]

And hiking and hiking boots, which hiking. Little dorky. I. I've taken on, you know, walking after every meal, so I know that's.

[Leo Laporte]

A good thing to do. That's what happens when you wear that glucose monitor. You.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, you're like, so. So I, I wander off into the woods every. Every after each meal just for a 10 or 20 minute like walk. And so I'm usually in hike. In hiking shoes.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you go for a walk after every podcast as well?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, but I usually eat right after the podcast. That means I am going to walk after the podcast. So. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, betas, they have arrived. Woohoo. And even though I cautioned myself against it, I couldn't help it. I installed it on both my Macs on my. I did not do it on my iPhone, actually, but I did do it on both my iPads. I'm waiting on the phone.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like I use the phone too much and I don't have a backup phone anymore because I gave it to my son. And so I so kind of like, like I'm not ready for things to freeze. You know, like, I think I'm going.

[Andy Ihnatko]

To, you know, it's not going to freeze. It's just going to kill your battery. That's what it's going to do. Okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm not sure if you actually go.

[Leo Laporte]

To the opposite of freeze, it's going to burn you.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah. It runs. That's. It runs hot and it kills the battery.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I'm working on the iPad too.

[Leo Laporte]

We now know. But he doesn't have a battery. I was, you know, at first, this ugly new thing. I really pissed me off. I wasn't pleased. But I've gotten used to it now, and it's okay. I'm talking about the iPad. I do like the windowing. That actually turned out to be more useful than I thought. I keep a few little windows open, which is great.

[Alex Lindsay]

Very disorienting on the. On the iPad. Like, I'm getting used to it, but it's just like this feels like. It does feel like a Mac. It feels like suddenly I've got like, just apps open.

[Jason Snell]

It's almost there. I have to turn off every other windowing aid that they've added because it's still very confusing that if you're giving me a windowing experience that feels like a Mac, I want to say I. Oh, add another window. Absolutely. So add another window. No, no. I've got a full screen. I've got a new workspace. Like, no, that's not what I wanted. I wanted these two windows side by side. But yeah, it is kind of freaky to wind up being like, have the. One of the things I missed about slide over. Like, the original version of iPad multitasking is that the thing is that on an iPad with a smaller screen, it's not necessarily about overlapping windows so much as the two things I want front and center, I want to be able to work on. So I like the idea that you'd always have two things side by side and they're tile. So I don't to worry about, like, arranging things. I like the fact that they've brought the Mac tiling up into the iPad. So I can simply say, I want this in the upper left quadrant. I want this in the lower left quadrant. I want this to be entirely in.

[Leo Laporte]

The left side of the screen so you tile them. See, I've been using overlapping.

[Jason Snell]

I do not. Not always, but it's. But it's like I'm a bit. I've always been a big fan of tiling. If you have a big enough screen, I will. I want a window manager. That will let me never have to like click something to. To uncover something else. I think that's very, very possible. And on the iPad there are. It's. It's less. It's. Whereas on my, on my Mac I might have like 10 windows, 20 windows open at the same time. On the iPad it tends to be. I'm. I'm focused on one task but I have a PDF that I want to keep it. I want to read to get notes from the styling.

[Leo Laporte]

Makes sense. And it's also not that big a screen. If I tiled on my giant monitor, I'd have to be looking like up and to the left and down to the right. It wouldn't be great. I have to say though, because Alt tab works very nicely on the iPad. I'm really using the iPad kind of like my Mac now.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And it's got to become more important because I'm still using this iPad as like an iPad with a keyboard and a trackpad. The ability to put like several external displays on an iPad. This is going to be much, much more important to have workspace management. Absolutely. Unlock. I'm def. I'm. I'm certainly going to give it a try, but it's going to be freaky as hell. The idea of having iPad apps that are a true desktop multi screen environment for me, it's going to take. It's going to take some time getting used to. But I'm really. This is the reason why like this is the first. I didn't put any of the betas on my MacBook but I was definitely going to be putting the first public beta on my iPad because of these features because they're going to be so useful for my workflows and be. Because I don't want to still be annoyed by the differences in September and this way to do that is to get in on them about a month early.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, you and Dan Moran over at Six Colors seem less than happy with liquid glass. And you also quote Harry McCracken who's concerned that it's steering the iPad in the wrong direction.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I don't agree with Harry, but I get his. He thinks that the. Especially the simplicity of split view and slide over is something that he's used all the time. Harry uses the iPad as his primary computer, basically. I mean, Harry is. We all know Harry. He's really smart and I think it's worth listening to somebody so committed to the iPad talk about what he thinks that this has lost. He feels like it was more of a unique experience and now it's just kind of like Mac light and like. I totally see that. I don't think I agree, but I totally see it. I will say there is an. See Split view. You can do split view. It's not like it was, but you can. You can tile, as Andy said, if you tile left and right, it actually puts the little gap down the middle with the little sliders so that you can choose the split view. It's basically split view in there. Slide over, though. I have heard from a bunch of people who loved Slide over, and the reason Slide over is not.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell us what Slide over is.

[Jason Snell]

Slide Over.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Slide over is a thing that's really easy to get to by accident, which is a problem. But you basically put an app off the side of the screen and then you swipe from the right edge and this little narrow version of an app comes in briefly and you can do something on it, and then you swipe it away and it disappears.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one thing I noticed. It's a little weird. I had never used that. And all of a sudden, a lot of my apps are that little wedge on the screen. On the right of the screen.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's something that it's kind of more present now because of these smaller windows.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right. So Slide over was like the easy little basic multitasking that you could do. And I think a lot of people, and I'm not one of them, but a lot of people really said, oh, I like this idea of I can just take. Take an app and have it available on demand off the side. And. And if I were Apple and I were listening to feedback, I would be processing that and saying, oh, we always viewed. Because I think they did always viewed Slide over as a compromise to do something like multitasking on the iPad way back when. And that now that it's. Now that they've got this, they don't need anymore. And I think it's not Slide Over. You can just stick a window off to the side. You can do that. But like this idea of a utility drawer with an app in it. Like, I think based on what I'm hearing, there is sort of a use case for this. And it would be great if the people working on this multitasking feature thought, okay, what. You know, what's behind that? Again, the goal is not to say, oh, give them back Slide Over. The goal is what motivates people to say, I really miss Slide Over. I think listening to people like Harry talk about what's been lost. When I think that by all Accounts. This new multitasking feature is amazing. It really is very, very good. The fact that some people are still kind of, like, sad for what they lost. Like, I think they killed Slide over because it was way too easy for regular users to put an app into Slide over and then not understand where the app went and why it was there and how to get rid of it. And that. That's a serious usability concern, too. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I thought we still had Slide over because I still see stuff over. It's over in the. Right on the gutter. There's a little window corner.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought that was. Isn't that Slide Over?

[Andy Ihnatko]

That is. But it's gone in.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. I still have it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, you. In fact, I think you have a window that when you're Expose, it's off to the. Off there and off the edge of the screen and you tap to bring it back. But that's. I think that's not the same thing. Okay, so. So, you know, I mean, I think. I think there are some valid points there because Apple did throw maybe through the baby out with the bathwater. It's possible. This new thing is great, but, like, I'm open to the idea that. Of what. What Harry is saying suggests that there are some unexplored aspects of. Of iOS or iPad6 productivity that maybe this version, as good as it is, has kind of left by the wayside. I think it's worth listening to those people noting those things.

[Leo Laporte]

A good example of using Slide Over, Alex Howard, our club member, says he's used it for his password manager for years. So having it always kind of there when you need it is.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, my guess. My guess is that they've heard this feedback and that the challenge is they've got this. This Expose view where you swipe up from the bottom. I wonder if they will create a. A tile format or something in Expose or something that kind of replicates the Quick flip it out. Like, I really like. Picture in Picture is a great example. You can put Picture in Picture off the. Off the screen, right? And it just like pokes out and says, I'm here, still playing, but you can't see me. You could do that with a window, right? You could have the concept of docking a window to the side and having it just kind of like it's still there and there's a little arrow and when you tap, it kind of slides out. You could do that. So maybe they will go down that path.

[Leo Laporte]

But do a feedback, folks. If you're using the beta and say.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, let them know. Because I think they just didn't understand that people used this feature. They thought it was a compromise and it's actually a productivity feature.

[Jason Snell]

But when you, when you think about it, it's. I think that that's. It's a bigger challenge. Window management and task management on the iPad is a bigger challenge than Apple has on any other platform because again, at the maximum you're dealing with a device that can have multiple external displays at once. And at the minimum, it's not just the iPad mini now it's going to be the. The iPhone fold the. Which rumor this week is that it's like actually going to be much, much smaller than you expect it to be. So that's with the smaller the screen, the more you need things like slide over, the more you need things like side by side split view and stuff like that. So my hat's off. It's a big challenge to set up for myself. I'm surprised that they haven't forked the platform at all. They haven't. They haven't decided to call certain iPads. Oh, now this is the iPhone Maximus.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they don't want to do that. Oh, God. Have two different.

[Jason Snell]

Or something like. No, not, not necessarily. But basically say that we are going to put these tools on these platforms and these tools on these platforms. You will. Not necessarily because we don't feel as though this slide over is relevant for a larger screen. However, we know it's essential on. On other things. Again, it's a wonderful, wonderful challenge and it bespeaks the unity of Apple platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

You've been so busy, Jason, with your reviews. The also the Mac OS Tahoe public beta review. How many thousands of words did you write about 2016?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Dan Moran and I together dropped 15,000 words last Thursday. So it was a lot, a lot coming,cos. I mean the thing is macOS tahoe is great. It adds a bunch of features that especially power users, people who watch shows like this will, I think, really love Spotlight stuff. Automation in shortcuts.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say I said, oh good, I can turn off Raycast and use Spotlight. I did it for about three seconds and went right back to Raycast. So real power users may not want to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I turned off Lunch Bar, which I've used for 15 years and I still haven't gone back.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Honestly. But I think there's something to be said. The whole idea. This goes back to like the idea of Sherlocking, right, Which is Apple should create good new features. For the Mac, that should happen. Even if there are utilities that used to fill the gap, there should be Clipboard history in the Mac. Right? It doesn't what Apple implements that they're implementing it for like the middle 80% or whatever the use cases on the edges, Apple is not going to bother with. And that's where third party utilities can live. And I've heard from a bunch of like super power user Clipboard utility people who are like, I'm not going to do this or launcher people, people who use Raycast saying this, this isn't for me. And I think that's great. It turns out that I don't use Launch Bar like that. I was mostly using it for some very specific features, all of which have basically been replicated by.

[Leo Laporte]

You were just launching apps.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Mostly launching apps and doing some web queries, which I can do and using it as my Clipboard history. I use it as a calculator. Spotlight's calculator is a little less reliable. So I may just switch to using PCALC instead for that stuff instead of just doing it in Spotlight and Emoji, which I'm using a utility called Rocket now to do that because Spotlight won't let you find an emoji and insert it, which was a thing that I used LaunchBar for. But in General macOS, Tahoe has a bunch of great power user features. Really nice. Depending on how you feel about Liquid Glass. I mean I, I think clearly Liquid Glass has been revealed to be something that the focus has been on implementing it on iOS and on the Mac. It feels kind of half implemented at best. And there are a bunch of things that they did that really frustrate me more. Not from a usability standpoint because I think people who are afraid of, of Liquid Glass design and I, I had somebody say, boy, all these complaints about it, I guess I just won't update to Tahoe. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's fine. It's completely usable. It's a missed opportunity. What they've done is disappointing. There's a lot of stuff that feels amateurish or half finished.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look at this music app, especially with Liquid Glass. I mean, this is from your review. That's unbelievable.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. To be fair, that is its worst case. If you swipe slightly, if you scroll slightly up, then you can read it. But this is one of those examples where, and to be honest, the only places you really see the Liquid Glass really come into the Forerunner and cross platform apps where they've decided to make it. You like music or photos. They got work to do. I mean, I'm withholding final judgments because the software isn't final. But what I can say is that I think you can be very productive with macOS Tahoe. And it adds a bunch of really nice stuff. And the liquid glass stuff. Yeah, it's a work in progress and they missed. You can tell the liquid glass stuff has been applied to the stuff that's cross platform, but not to the stuff that's unique to the Mac, which is the tell that the Mac was never really a serious part of the thought process because like the toolbars, the stuff in the toolbars don't get me started. But it's like it's not glass. It's just like a thing that floats on another thing with a drop shadow when they're all gray and it's just not. I don't even know. But again, it's usable. I just don't really. That part makes me sad because I feel like I was. I've been thinking about Aqua a lot lately because you know, a clear aqua is basically liquid glass. And I think an implementation of something like that on the Mac, a modern version of Aqua that is not blue but is just kind of like clear glass, it could look cool and interesting, but you know, depending on how you feel about liquid glass, maybe it's a blessing that the Mac looks pretty generic and in most cases you don't have a lot of liquid glass getting in the way.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the transparent menu bar. I like the fact that they have added the live previews into the live. What do they call it? Live action into the menu bar, which is hysterical live activity.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh, live activities. Yeah, yeah. From your, from your iPhone. So like if you have an iPhone, live activity, it just pushes it into the monkey. Although I had to turn off mirroring.

[Leo Laporte]

Live activity because I never watched the things live. So it spoiled the race.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, you don't want to be spoiled for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't care about the Giants. Yeah, that's good.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And, and there's a whole. I mean they, they've taken Control center, which, you know, bringing Control center to the Mac seems kind of pointless. Right? It was like, oh boy, just what we need is Control Center. But like Control center in Tahoe on the Mac they have created a toolbar or a menu bar manager, like bartender. That's what that is going to be. It is the new controls API. Third party apps can use it. So third party apps can write things. They can show up in Control center they can show up in the menu bar. And the big tell is you can create multiple. It's like multiple pages on iOS. It's multiple icons in the menu bar of Control center that you can do a custom icon and then you can put whatever you want in there. Very much that is the future of the menu bar on the Mac. And it's such a great. This is the stuff that makes me happy is when they do stuff like this where they took an iOS idea and then they applied it to the Mac and now they're thinking of a Mac like way. Like what would be the true implementation of Control center on the Mac. And the answer is it's actually menu bar centric and it's a menu bar icon manager. So you can have things in sub menus or on the menu bar if you use the new API. So like older menu extras that currently exist don't go in there. But I think that Apple's vision for the long term future of that, of that of what goes on in the menu bar, especially since we've got a lot of screens with notches and it's hard to fit a bunch of stuff up there. You know, Bartender can still do its thing. But like I love that Apple is building a way for you to organize your stuff up in the menu bar. That is a thing it should be doing for the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm also thrilled. The other thing coming over from iOS is automation and shortcuts. I was stunned when I was trying to do that on the Mac that I couldn't. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

How do you set a time shortcut? You can do that on an iPhone and on the Mac it just hasn't been possible. And they finally did that. Plus they're bringing back essentially the equivalent of what used to be called Folder actions in AppleScript, which is the idea that you use those all the time. If you drop something in a folder, it will run a shortcut that will look at the contents of the folder and you can decide what it does and that I've set some of those up and that's great. I've talked to people who've said, yeah, I've got this thing that at 2 in the morning it scans this particular folder and you know, it's stuff you could automate but before you were certain party tools or you could use Hazel. And it's the same story, right. It's like Hazel is still going to have an audience because Hazel does a lot of different stuff. But to have that center part of like you don't need to Go to a third party utility I think you know that is functionality that should be in the system and it really was back in Tiger. Right. But it hasn't been. It's been sort of very automator or Apple script centric and now there's this new thing that's all based on shortcuts.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you excited, Alex? Are we winning you over? Are you about to do it?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, it has less to do with the operating system and more to do with all the stuff that won't work. It's just that all the other apps that have to catch up and everybody else. So I think that my delay has less to do with Apple and more to do with a bunch of professional apps that are cross platform that take time to get to and so again Tahoe is in my future. My my pretty. I'm going to probably start upgrading things to that and I'll let this one sit for another year and you know I'll have a. I already have a handful of computer computers on 26 to test some other things that I. That won't run without it. So. So I. So I've got a couple of things that are already there and it's great. But I'm not putting on my main computer probably until sometime next summer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I should say though it's.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I'm in production. Production is an entirely different world. If I was. Oh if it was consumer and if I was a regular just using my computer, I'd be on it right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I understand. And you know the fact that like the Focusrite didn't work with Windows 11 for a long time.

[Alex Lindsay]

You just end up with a lot of things like people I know somebody just plugged something in in office hours. I can't think of what it wasn't yet like that doesn't work anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it is. Jason, would you agree? Or Andy. It's. It's been stable on all the devices I've put it on. I haven't had a single problem.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, I haven't had. The only problems I've had on iPadOS is certain apps that haven't been updated yet like the YouTube app. Sometimes it competes with the stoplight, the stoplight menu for menu control because it puts one of the minimize. It puts one of the controls for its own window in the place where that is supposed to go. So sometimes there's competition between. I actually want to full size this but unfortunately that's why Apple does betas.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So it's okay. Google get it together and also let's.

[Jason Snell]

Let'S shame Google a little bit. They are, they are often way, way slow in adding stuff to their own apps.

[Leo Laporte]

You point out, Jason, that the icon creators that haven't updated their icons get shamed.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh yeah. If you, if you, if you make, even if you make the little square with, you know, rounded rectangle and you've diverged too much outside of it, they just slam slap you in jail in this little dark gray jail. And ironically, the apps that have not done any attempt to look like Apple's apps like Acorn look okay. But the ones that have got a box that they're breaking out of slightly now, it's a box inside a box. It looks really bad. And again, my, my, I'm irate about this because I feel like Apple has so many ways to motivate developers. Like they, they introduced this brand new icon composer app that'll let you build like Liquid Glass takes on your icons. It's really smart. There are lots of reasons you want to look like a modern app on the Mac to, for them to forcibly like deface app icons that don't follow their rules. I think it's a bad, I think it's just yet another showing of Apple not really treating developers well. And I get it for the beta process, but you know, I asked Apple is this intended to be something that ships? And they said it was. And I think that's a huge mistake because I think it's, it's just disrespecting those app developers and also it shuts down the whole idea of like, I think it's very clever when there's a round rect and a little part of it sticks out. In fact, I thought it was great when the preview app showed a loop and a picture and the picture was just kind of sticking out of the round rect. Well, the new preview app is just a picture of a loop and it's like, if you don't know what a loop is, is it an upside down shot glass? What is it like? It's just, they're losing kind of like what the meaning of these apps are and you're losing some creativity in app icons, giving people a little bit of latitude to experiment because, oh no, what if the user sees an icon that's slightly different from standard? I think that that's not something Apple should be legislating with a shame box that they put around these, these app icons. So it's just dumb. I just, it's an unforced error. It's bad for Developers like use the carrot, don't use the stick. Right now especially this is the last kind of thing that Apple should be pulling on app developers.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I ap my Pixel Google Pixel tablet is now playing Drake's Get It Together. Because I said get it Together.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's great. It's best for a YouTube stream, but it's great thematically.

[Leo Laporte]

That was pretty weird. Okay, what else, what else do we think is good, Bad, ugly? I can't say I'm a fan of Liquid Glass particularly. I guess I'll get used to it. In fact, I did get kind of used to it.

[Jason Snell]

I'm not really noticing it. And again, I'm sure that we'll notice it more when more apps are updated to support it, but we're seeing more Apple apps that are supporting it. The thing to understand is that it's not just the standard calls for making buttons have been updated. It's that they've actually updated a whole bunch of UI elements so that the real benefit is going to be when these app developers start to rethink about how do I want to do a tab group, how do I want to. How do I want an action button to actually influence what's going on and how do I want to communicate where the user is inside a workflow or inside the app using depth information?

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say that that first toothpaste welcome that you see when you first install it really turned me off. I thought, oh crap, I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

It reminded me of the first version of the developer beta where it's like, oh, this could get very old very quickly. But, but the thing is, I think that it's good to basically go out, enter the stage on a bang and basically announce to people that there are lots of really great things you're going to see. This is going to be. Make them understand this is a different thing from the. From the get go. So long as that's not the experience for the entire the entire productivity feed.

[Leo Laporte]

It does fate. That is the most foreground part of Liquid Glass and it does kind of fade away. There is just the occasional place where it's so transparent that you go, this is not functional. This is not a good choice here. Andrew Cunningham said the IPADOS 26 makes the rare software update that makes most old hardware feel new. Most of the most older iPads will work with it. Right?

[Jason Snell]

Yep. My M1, my first generation M1 iPad works absolutely fine. There's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

You were worried about that? Yeah, I was.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I was again. I've unfortunately it's not just that something works, it's like, okay, but is it the sort of thing where, yes, you can install this operating system but you will not have access to a certain range of features that are beyond the capabilities of this hardware? Or yeah, this feature works, but you're not going to want to use it because it doesn't have enough RAM to support everything that has to go for it. But yeah, there has been nothing but upside for me for installing the first public beta and I am a pretty heavy iPad productivity user, so I'm very happy with figure.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of Preview, Jason, I like having Preview in the iPad. That makes me happy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, they finally brought a bunch of little apps that journal yeah. To the iPad for the first time. And Preview is one of those things where it used to be like you could quick look something in files, but like now it's just, you know, use a Preview app for PDFs. And I, I did. I was writing a story where I had a PDF about, about what I was writing about in Preview and I had my text editor in two different windows and I was using the magic keyboard. I was sitting out in my backyard writing my, my, my story and I realized I had basically replicated the way I always put those windows on my Mac where I can go back and forth and you know, look at the PDF and then you know, reference that in the story and go back and forth and back and forth and you know, it's a little thing, but like it, it, it made my workflow that much more convenient because I don't have to go either find a different PDF viewer or use files, which is not what it's for. So yeah, it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

And now I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Andy.

[Jason Snell]

I was hoping that Jason can clarify something for me. I was confused as to the behind the scenes role of Preview. I understand that. My understanding, which I haven't really researched yet, is that it's also going to be sort of the holding pen for everything that, for all the file types that Quick look can access. So that if I'm, if I'm publishing, if I have an app that uses, that uses files or documents, if I'm publishing the how to Preview or Quick look, my file format, I'm actually adding, I'm actually giving it to Preview, not necessarily giving it to QuickLook. QuickLook is going to be relying on Previews assets in order to be able to quick look more documents.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have not tried using an arbitrary file type in Preview to see what happens. So I'm not actually sure what the relationship is there. I've mostly been doing, you know, images and PDFs because that's what I always use preview for.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it, though, that the file manager is really improved considerably. I mean.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

It used to be confusing as hell. Now it's confusing as all get out. But not even. Not even confusing as heck.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's more. It's more like finder light every day, which is a good thing. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And part of it, I think, is I'm expecting it to be more like a finder, more to be. To be more than Apple maybe intends.

[Leo Laporte]

For it to be. So now many of us, many of us normies are going to have to decide because Apple has pushed out the last, I guess, update for iOS and I'm sure macros and all the OSs. And now I have to sit here. I could download 18.6 on my phone or could turn on the beta updates and go public.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They'll have security updates for a little while longer for those OSes as well. So you don't have to choose. I think, look, there's a. There's a whole spectrum here. I think that the OSes are safe enough in my experience that you could use them. And with the exception of things like the occasional incompatibility or visual glitch or, you know, or hot iPhone, or a hot iPhone that eats the battery a little bit more than maybe you'd like or like, oh, it. The Windows server crash. And it comes back and it's like a slight. But like, basically I've been using these since the mid to late June and I'd say they're all fine. So if you're really curious, you should just go ahead and it'll be fine. That said, the spectrum runs all the way from there to Alex saying, I can't wait for next summer when I install Mac OS Tahoe. And all of that is okay, right? Like, because the way it'll happen is they'll go final in the fall. Maybe you, maybe you force an update then, the way Apple does it. If you don't force an update those first few weeks, you don't get it because they're trying to like, slowly bring people onto the operating system. And then, and then in like maybe October or November, you'll actually get the update asking you to install it. But you can still say no. And like, it's okay, right? Like, go at your own speed. You can go now. And I think it would be fine. But you know, I also Totally understand why people like Alex. And Alex is not the only person I know who's like, I have friends.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm. I'm pretty aggressive. I have friends. They're on Mojave. Yeah. Like, they're like pro tools, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Because 32 bit apps especially. Yeah, that's what. That's the thing. And it's okay, right? Like, it's okay. You don't have to be on the latest and greatest, especially if you don't see the benefit. Although I will say again, for iPad and Mac users, more than most recent years, there are direct benefits this year.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I. And usually what happens is that you end up with a situation where I have. Usually what moves me forward on at least one of the computers or a couple will be that there's some app or some feature that I absolutely need for work. And that's what pushes me forward. Oftentimes in Keynote, Apple tends to go, hey, Keynote. This new version of Keynote isn't going to run on the. Not last one. And I push Keynote pretty hard. So I'm usually like, okay. So I always have a computer that won't grumble. Yeah. It's usually because it's something stretching things. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, those are the good and the ugly features. Now we're going to go to the bad. Well, let's do it after the break. It's out of order. You're supposed to go good, bad, ugly. But you know, we don't have a theme song, so it's okay. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. We're taking a look at the new public betas with Alex. Lindsay, who is a refrainer, represents the refraining group.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Beta never.

[Leo Laporte]

Beta never. Group. Of course, Jason and Andy, who are all gung ho.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Beta ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Beta ever.

[Jason Snell]

Mostly I'm gung.

[Leo Laporte]

Ha.

[Jason Snell]

No MacBook, no MacBook.

[Leo Laporte]

Gung is all, get out. And me, I'm in the middle, torn between the devil on my right shoulder and the angel on my left. But you know what I decided? Oh, heck, just do it, Leo. So I am, in fact installing iOS 26 beta on the iPhone. We may regret this. We'll find out. This episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by Helix Sleep. That's something I do not regret. Our mattress was about 8 years old. I had read, and I think it's true, that you should replace your mattress every six to eight years, six to 10. Unless you don't mind sagging in the middle. Sometimes people go, but this mattress just fits me. Okay, that's fine. But we were ready to get a new one. We looked around, we read the reviews, and we chose Helix Sleep. And I am so glad your mattress is more than just a place you sleep eight hours a night. First of all, I'm there 10 hours a night trying to sleep. But the Helix helped with that. But there's also other things you might do on your mattress. You know what I'm talking about? Movie nights with your partner, Morning cuddles with your kitty cat, Rosie, or your dog spot. Your wind down ritual after long days. You know what I love? I love curling up with a good book on my Kobo. Just, I love that. And your mattress is at the center of it. All right? That's where you spend a lot of time, more than just sleeping. Now, if you are having trouble with your current mattress, maybe you're waking up with, you know, sweating like crazy. That's not good. Or you got back pain. That's that sag in the middle. That's not good for your back or you feel every time your partner turns over and the whole thing is like, was there an earthquake here in California? That's a very common response to your partner turning over or the dog jumping on the bed. These are classic mattress nightmares. But Helix Sleep, I love it. It changes everything. No more night sweatshirt. We got. Oh, we got this beautiful topper for it that Helix sells that makes it cool and refreshing all the time. I love it. No more back pain because it's. We got the one for side sleepers. They have one for every way you sleep. And that's nice too. In fact, if you go to the website helixsleep.com TWIT they've got a sleep quiz designed by Sleep PhDs so you can, you can, you know, explain, describe how you sleep and it will recommend a good, you know, mattress. A good Helix for you. You deserve, you deserve a good night's sleep. Deep sleep. You really do. We were looking around, we looked at the reviews. I saw one buyer reviewing it with five stars saying, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else that will. That was, that was interest. That was convincing. So I, then I looked at the magazines and oh, my gosh, time and time again, Helix Sleep is the most awarded mattress brand. Wired magazine's best mattress of 2025. Best mattress of 2025. Okay. Good Housekeeping's betting awards 2025 for premium plus size support. I'm not a small guy. I need something that's going to have some good support. GQ Sleep Awards 2025 best hybrid mattress. The Wirecutter New York Times Wirecutter Awards 2025 featured for plus size Oprah's Daily Sleep Awards for 2025. I like this one. Best hotel, like, feel. Okay. You know, it is true. If you go to a nice hotel and you, you know, you does feel, like, pretty special, right? So maybe, maybe that was, maybe that was, you know, what they're talking about. It does feel like you're sleeping in a very special place. 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 site wide exclusive for listeners of MacBreak 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] TWIT I'm telling you, could not be happier with our Helix Sleep. And you know what? Rosie likes it too. She's sleeping on it right now. Helixsleep.com TWIT all right, there is one complaint which to me seems like a positive. In iOS 26, the GOP says it could cost political campaigns millions of dollars. How? Why would that. Because it allows you to create groups and filter out texts from unknown senders.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they made a change. The messages has always allowed you to say, hey, if something's coming from an unknown sender, don't display it. Just put it to one side. It's not necessarily marked as spam or junk. It just basically says, I'm not going to alert you to that. I'm going to let you have to go and check that. With iOS 26, that's now on by default. And basically the Senate Republicans, the Senate Republican organization basically published a memo or a note or a letter basically saying that this could destroy us because that means that our political, our robotechs are not going to be displayed immediately. And ends with the ominous thing that we have. We have only two months to do something about this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This.

[Jason Snell]

It's like, oh, dear, what are you going to do?

[Alex Lindsay]

I can't. So pathetic to talk about that in public.

[Leo Laporte]

Like they're going to filter out our spam.

[Alex Lindsay]

So crass. Like, you know, sending people texts randomly is such a crass thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I will turn this on immediately. Nobody texts me that. I don't know. And if they do, it's either offering me a bogus job.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I immediately, like, report as junk and block.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, block and this might be the gap. Might have gotten wind of this. But I. If I type stop and I don't immediately get a message back saying, okay, well, no more. I block and junk that too.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, here's the problem is if you. If you type stop, it means they know it's an active number. So you won't get reached by that person, but your number gets shared.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's why I get so many of these.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So you have to. You can't. You can't show any sign of life.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, that's the key to life. So this will be good. I won't have to worry about it. I'll just put it in the unknown folder.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you report a spam and block, your phone blocks it. And it also tells Apple that that number is suspect. And so if a lot of people. It doesn't take very many people before it shows up as spam. And it automatically. Well, it'll automatically come in and say, this is spam.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it tells your carrier too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I thought the block imessage it tell. I think it tells you, but you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Want to do report and block, but not. Not say stop. Don't say.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't say stop. Okay, no more stop.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's no sign of life. That's the key. That's why you never want to answer. That's why you never want to answer. A robocall is because that's a sign of life. That means that that number is good. So whether they get a hold of you or not, they now know you're fresh, you know you're. You're ready to go. That's why my phone. If I don't. If you're not in my phone, you can't get a hold of me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you just gave me a reason to upgrade my iPhone. Now I'm really happy.

[Jason Snell]

Or just turn on that feature or.

[Alex Lindsay]

Just do what I do, which is that I have. I have focus mode during the day from 9 to 6, and that means only a handful of people can actually reach me in real time. Then I have do not disturb after six, and the only thing that can reach me is my washing machine.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Oh, I guess that makes sense. Notification, dryer notifications.

[Alex Lindsay]

Otherwise, no, I forget. I forget about my wash. And I'll wash it like three or four times in a row because I can't. If I don't flip it in 15 minutes, I'll rewash it because I don't really smell and so the, and so the. So anyway, so my washer and dryer can talk to my phone, but that's the only thing that's allowed to talk to my.

[Leo Laporte]

You are a modern guy. The only thing that can reach me during working hours is my washing machine.

[Alex Lindsay]

Non working hours. In, in working hours, I've got a, you know, there's like 30 people that can get a hold of me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Oh, you mean after hours. It's even more restrictive.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, after hours.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

So you do it. The op. Most people restrict during.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I don't. I, I have all the people that I, you know, all the people that I have to be able to respond to during business, for business, during the week, during the day. As soon as it gets out of that. No, no, no, I'm not. Not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the single best thing you could do to your phone is turn off notifications for everything.

[Alex Lindsay]

Notifications are the death of, of deep productivity. You know, like they just, you know, I have. I don't turn. Literally it's my wash and that's it. That's the only thing allowed to notify me ever. And it is like when. And every once in a while when I turn it off, like, oh, I don't know if that person's going to call and I'll turn off my focus and I start getting notifications for a little while. I'm like, how do people live this way? Like, this would make me totally. I think it just slowly makes everybody totally insane. But it's, it is a having all those, you know, and your Mac won't let you turn them off all the way. You have to have a minute. So at 9:59, my. If I'm still up at 9:59, my Mac goes, oh, I got all these things I gotta tell you. And it's like this long thing comes stringing down on the side of my screen. There are all these things I didn't tell you today.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, that's some of the best technology that goes into any phone or any phone operating system. Look, on my end Android phone. I just like the fact that the controls for making sure that no app can disrupt you that way ever again is embedded inside the notification. So like after I've set up a new phone, like I'll be under threat for a couple of weeks. But every time I say no, do never ever show me that kind of notification ever again. Okay, I'm sorry, I won't do that. Okay. Me notifications from this app, but not this type of notification. And right now, so right now, really I don't get any notifications that I don't, that aren't relevant to my life.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I don't, I don't think any of them relevant to my life. But, but the, but the, the, you know, the thing is I think that people don't realize how much control and don't take advantage of that. You know, like I still, you know, I'm still on X because it's my, where I have the largest following and, and I, and I keep track of. But I am brutal. Like I, my ex is different than everybody else's because I have so many, I have two over 200 words that if you put into your tweet, I won't see it. Like, it just filters out. And so there's like 200 blocked words in my security. And then if I see anything that I don't like in X, I'm just like block, like. And I'm just like brutal like block, block, block, block, block, block, block, you know, and so I think that, I think that people don't take advantage of the kind of things. And again, on my phone and on my computers, everything is turned down and then I go look for it. I mean I'm checking my text all the time. I'm checking my email like when I, when I'm going to. But if I get into a deep thought or I'm in a conversation I don't even want to look at, if I'm talking to someone, I don't want to look at my watch or my phone. You know, I feel, I find that to be, I am old fashioned and I think that's disrespectful to be at a dinner with somebody and something pops up on my phone. I don't, I'm not going to look at it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just changing mores a little bit. First of all, you can't go to a restaurant without noticing everybody's looking at their. Yeah, but like, and looking at your watch no longer means what time is it? I'm getting antsy. It often means there's other stuff going on.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. And, but, but you know, I, and I think that it, it is, but I think my family is all the same. Like my kids are the same way, you know, so they, good for them. They're not looking at their phone while we're like when we train them. Well, no, you know, I think what happened was they didn't have a phone until they were, I think they didn't have phones until they were 14, I think. And so they didn't. They just didn't really buy into that. And it was mostly so we knew. Knew when to pick them up from high school.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see how long it lasts. They'. They still, like, let's see how long.

[Alex Lindsay]

They leave their phones behind all the time. Like, it's. I'm surprised. Like, I think that. I mean, they still use them, but they. They just are more analog for whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Reason when they come back from college. Okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could definitely change. Although I think that. I think they view it as their friends are kind of crazy, you know, because their friends are constantly in all these media.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And. And they just think that that's kind of a nutty place to be. So I don't know if the. I mean, I think that if you got into it now, social media would look a lot crazier to you than if you've been in it forever. You know, it's. It's that I was watching this thing talking about electric cars. They were like, if you brought out a gas car, if all there was electric cars and you brought out a gas.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, what the hell are you doing?

[Alex Lindsay]

They're like. They're like, well, it has to. You know, it doesn't run as well. It doesn't. You know, it has to have little explosions all the time. You have to have 150 moving parts instead of seven. You have to fill. You can't fill it up at home.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, it's like all these things, they're like, no one would ever buy one. And so in the same way, I think that when you look at social media, I think that if you're new to it, especially if you've seen other people and how crazy it makes them, I don't know if people are as into newbies, are as into it as the folks that have gotten that were the.

[Leo Laporte]

Remind me eight years from now to ask Alex. Kids.

[Alex Lindsay]

My son wants to build a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, he's just like, yeah, I got him land. Still have influence over.

[Alex Lindsay]

He's got land. He's got five acres.

[Leo Laporte]

He bought land.

[Alex Lindsay]

I didn't buy it. My family has land.

[Leo Laporte]

So he's, oh, nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

But we carved out the five acres that he can have if he wants to build a log cabin.

[Leo Laporte]

So just Steven in our club, Twit Discord, says, I'm not holding out hope this new feature will be useful. My mom has dementia. My mom, too, and she responds to these text messages. My mom, too. I want them to go away, not just be hidden in an unknown filter. The problem now is Apple keeps switching back to all messages. I can't keep it in known senders only. Yeah, because that. That's new. In 26, though, it will leave.

[Andy Ihnatko]

In 26, the unified view takes all of those things from unknowns and puts them behind like a menu where you have to go see them and triage them, which I think, again, maybe not exactly what Gallifrey Rebel is asking for here, but it's closer. I mean, I feel like it's gone from.

[Leo Laporte]

I need to do maybe using his Star wars name. So I just. I use just Steven. Okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, that's a Doctor who name and a Star wars name together.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a double. A double.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, I love it. Let's shout out to the Discord. They're in there. So this one, like, right now, it's sort of like you can triage it and it's really inconvenient and all that. And this new version, it's like. Like not so much triage as it is, like the stuff you care about and then everything else is kind of over here in a place you can just forget about it if you want to. And depending on how you live your life, you know that. I think for me, the onboarding has been a little harder because when you first do it, you have to go over there and be like, the mark is known. Mark is known. Mark is known. Right. For things that you actually use. But the nice thing is you mark them as known, you don't have to add them to your contacts list.

[Leo Laporte]

List.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Once they're marked as known, they show up in your regular list. But otherwise they're just kind of buried. And I think that's where they belong, frankly. And I get why any political group, any fundraising group would be upset about this in the same way that Facebook was upset about Do Not Track, which is it's Apple taking a thing that they rely on and putting it off to the side. And just because it's the Republicans. Don't worry. Act Blue will feel. Will freak out about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, everybody will.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Everybody will. And good, good. We don't owe them our attention, right? We don't owe them anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Alex Lindsay]

And adults will figure out what to do next. Like, what is the next thing? Like, they're going to, like, figure out what the next thing is. They're not going to complain about what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're going to come knocking on your door. That's what they're going to do and say, here's my hat, put some money in it.

[Jason Snell]

But because you can, you can see how they're going to do the same tricks that like the, the spammers do.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is use a phone number that's.

[Jason Snell]

Well, not just that, but the way to get around this, this feature of Apple is that it's for numbers that you've never interacted with. So they'll probably do something like, hey, your social. This is from the Republican Party and we're concerned about your Social Security benefits. Make sure, make sure you, make sure you click on this link to which connects you to the Social Security Administration. As long as they get them to interact with it. Once they get, they get past the red, the red velvet.

[Alex Lindsay]

And again it's easy to, it's easy to line up something if when it happens there are tools now and Apple keeps on making better and better tools and Google's making good tools as well. Just block those numbers. Like, just be aggressive, you know. Like, you know, it's, you know, be aggressive about. You don't know. What if I don't, if I see a phone number that I don't know. Generally my phone doesn't ring. So. And it definitely doesn't ring at any time if I don't know who the number is. And so I don't really. I'm not even notified that the number's coming in if I look at it later. And it is not something that I knew I actively block it. Like I'm just like, you know, and.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So in 26, like, and it's not like a little colored text like it is in current OSes. There are two buttons below something that comes in over the transom that is from an unknown entity and they are mark as known which means that they will now be not filtered and block and it reports it as junk and it blocks it and you're done. And I like what that says too because it says, look, this is one of two things, right? This is something that you know or it's bad and should go away. So you choose. I mean you can choose not to choose and they will just continue to go into this purgatory. But like, I really like that because like my, I don't know the tire store come text me and says your, your tire rotation is done. Come pick up your car. It's like Marcus known. I need. I mean I, I actually have them as a contact in my contacts. But you get that thing where it's like, it's a transactional thing. Like, oh, well, yeah, this is, this is the restaurant.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Mark is known like I don't sure.

[Leo Laporte]

So there might be a period, but otherwise, no, you kind of are adjusting it a little.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think it's important to be. I think it's important for it to be simple too because the problem is like with, with gdp, gdpr, you end up with this. Like every website is like, you know, most, you know, not, not everyone. The good websites are give you the option to do what we all do, which is reject. All right. The bad websites are like accept or we're going to explain a whole bunch of things to you and take a bunch of your time for you to try to figure out where the thing is to turn off, you know, and so which I think is actually against the gdpr, but that's a whole nother thing. But they, they, they want to put you some in some kind of hole or they try to trick you where the buttons are the wrong way and everything else. And I think Apple is coming from it of, well, we're just going to make it go away, you know. So I think it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, when they ring, maybe it'll sound like this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Little reverb.

[Leo Laporte]

We played it before, but pretty intense. Play it again. That's the new marimba. It's called alt1. No, is it reflection? Oh, I see. Reflection has two. Two different sounds. One is default and one is alt1.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Reflection.

[Leo Laporte]

Reflection.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I like reflection sounds. It sounds like the score for Marimba the Motion Picture to me.

[Leo Laporte]

It does.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Does like. It's a very, you know, exciting, quirky moment that you're gonna, you're gonna. It's gonna make you laugh, it's gonna make you cry, it's gonna make you answer your phone. Those are the things that they'll do.

[Jason Snell]

It hit me more like that scene like in a sort of a spy movie in which the. The protagonist is now like on a train and sort of looking out the window and he doesn't know like, who.

[Leo Laporte]

Okie dokie. Let's take a little time out. And then we have more news. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy and Ako, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. We're so glad you're here. We do the show Tuesdays. You probably know that. But if you wanted to watch live, you actually could. If you're in the club, of course, you get what I like to think of it as. Behind the velvet rope, special access. You're up in the balcony, you know, and you can watch the show in the club. Twit Discord. Ironically, it's not the best audio and video. So despite the fact that you are in a privileged position, you may still want to check it out on YouTube which is open to all Twitch tech, Twitch, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook, Kik TikTok we stream on eight different platforms. We do that every Tuesday 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UT. Of course you don't have to watch live. The only reason you might want to watch live is so that you can, you know, chat while we're doing the show. And I see the chats in all the different platforms so you know we love that. But you know, please be my guest. Watch at your leisure. You can download a copy of the show. There's audio and video from our website Twit tv. There's also podcast clients you can use. There's even a YouTube channel which is a great way to subscribe share rather little clips from from our shows. So please enjoy it as you feel. Just don't put us in the unknown folder, okay? That's all I ask. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, I'm departing from ATT and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Jason Snell]

Bon voyage.

[Leo Laporte]

Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days.

[Jason Snell]

Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits.

[Leo Laporte]

With finance agreement eg Apple iPhone16128Gigabyte $8029.99 Eligible trade in eg IPH Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Contact T Mobile Attention sports enthusiasts. Keep the adrenaline pumping and elevate your.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

This episode this episode is brought to you by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I love hearing 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 technologists develop open source software to combat surveillance. Have you used privacy Badger? You oughta 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 ask the question what does the world look like if we get the this right? Visit eff.org 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 JP Morgan nears a deal to take over Apple's credit card program. Goldman's been trying to get out of this practically since day one. I have a Chase credit card, so it would be just like that, right? I guess.

[Jason Snell]

I wonder what terms if the new partner has to accept. Like Apple's existing terms for that card. Like you have to send out all your bills on the exact same day. Even though that's one of the problems that caused.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one of the reasons.

[Alex Lindsay]

A lot of times though, what happens is you build a system and you suddenly realize something's really hard. Someone else comes in and they'll do the same thing you were doing. But being able to look at it that years, you know, five years in or 10 years in or whatever, you're able to see where we could make efficiencies based on that process.

[Leo Laporte]

And Goldman managed to lose money on a card that had $20 billion in balances. You know what, that's impressive that you could lose money on that, to be honest.

[Jason Snell]

Well, the thing is, we don't know all the terms that Apple was imposing on the deal. I hope that. I think that given that this is a product that Apple wants to succeed wildly and it's not obviously not succeeding wildly yet. I hope that this, in addition to the bank looking at the past five years of transactions and figuring out what went wrong, it's also Apple saying, okay, maybe that was too ambitious. And maybe we can call. We can, we can, we can lean back on that a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I. My Chase card is a Visa. I don't know if this means it would become. Because it's a MasterCard right now, it might become a Visa. I don't know if that's a big deal.

[Alex Lindsay]

Deal.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they're basically the same, right. Apparently visa offered Apple $100 million, according to Bloomberg, I'm sorry, the Wall Street Journal, to take over the network. I don't, you know, I can't think of any reason this would really affect Apple card holders.

[Jason Snell]

No, I mean, I've been reading about how you have to have a bank that has the chops to operate internationally, so they can keep expanding it to different territories. But for the people who already have Apple Card, it's. I'm sure it's not going to change much at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Earnings are coming. Yes.

[Jason Snell]

Jason, Thursday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. You got the colored ink ready?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Warm up the charts. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Farm up.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Sure. We'll see. This is going to be. I mean, it's the. It's the. It's not a very interesting quarter, but they often find interesting things to say. We're in the saggy quarters quarter before the iPhone comes out. It's just kind of like. Because it's like holiday quarter. And then it's like.

[Alex Lindsay]

This isn't the most saggy quarter. The next one is the most saggy quarter.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It can be the summer.

[Alex Lindsay]

The summer is because we all know the iPhone's coming. No one's buying.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right. The difference is that in the next quarter, they'll at least be able to talk about or characterize how iPhone sales are going, because the iPhone will be on sale then. This one is just kind of much of a summer. What was that?

[Alex Lindsay]

Is there much of a school bump?

[Andy Ihnatko]

You Know, I think there, there is, there is a school bump of a kind. But it's like, I think the school buying is so spread out now and such a small percentage part of Apple's business than it used to be that it's probably invisible.

[Jason Snell]

We'll get to see how effective that, that convince your parents to buy you a Mac for school campaign paid off. That's going to be, that's. We're looking forward to that. But I forget which CNBC or some other site basically did a roundup of what analysts are expecting and out of 12 analysts, nine are still expecting it to be a buy. I think two are expecting it to be a hold and only one is expecting it to be a sell. They're expecting good news. Canalysts actually released their second quarter. Sorry, was it the second quarter or just last month's iPhone sales? And they were, it wasn't good news. IPhone sales were down 11% year over year for that same period. So that's, that wouldn't affect, I think their, their call, their call for, for Thursday because I don't think that's part of the second quarter. But they're going to have a lot to talk about. I think they, they are certainly going to. It's going to be interesting to see what they highlight in Tim's prepared comments. That's, that's always what I look at. That's always really interesting because, because as I keep saying, it's the one public statement that Apple, any company makes where you cannot lie or misdirect in any way, shape or form or else shareholders might hold you to. You might wind up having to pay a half a billion dollar settlement to your shareholders as Tim did.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, and the SEC might have a problem with it too. Right, Exactly. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not necessarily what they say, but it's what they choose to say and what they choose not to talk about and how they choose to spin what they spin in. And you know, it's become less and less interactive over time. The analyst call that happens, you know, is now mostly prepared statement and then there are a bunch of prepared questions from prepared analysts and they get prepared answers and it's. But still it is the one place where they have to make some decisions about how they're going to talk about their business and they can't lie. So we can still learn from it.

[Jason Snell]

Actually. Do we actually know that they get the questions ahead the of. Of time? I know obviously, obviously they line up who's going to, who's going to get.

[Andy Ihnatko]

To ask the questions, but I think they line up. Who's going to ask the questions? I think the people who are asking the questions are asking questions that they think Apple is going to like. But I don't think it's all fixed. Like I said, I don't think Apple has the questions, but I think the questions are prepared and I think Apple only responds in things written down. And like they don't necessarily know the question, but they know the kind of question and they're never off their game. Now they're reading from prepared, if not prepared answers, sentences that they've prepared that they then thread together. So it's all, it just feels more and more artificial every quarter because that.

[Jason Snell]

Because that's the other fun part of it is that this is the one place where someone can ask them a question they have not specifically vetted in advance and off the cuff. They have to come up with an answer that once again is going to be like Google's. Google's call was last week and Sundar Pichai wound up saying some very interesting things in the Q and A that aren't like, aren't like mind blowing revelations but added some clarity to a lot of the stuff that they've been doing in the past. Like, like for instance, mentioning that like okay, are you, yes, you're getting, yes, we're getting into glasses. But we don't think that, we think that the, the phone's place as the center of people's ecosystem is secure for, for many years in the, at the very least. I don't think he's actually said that before. So that's, that's why like these things tend to be, I'm not pretending that I understand like the filings or the numbers or stuff like that. I'm more interested in saying and interested in hearing what do they want people to think? What, what gets. What, what gets a highlighted spot in the prepared comments. And did they get. Are they going to let something, are they going to acknowledge something during the Q and A that they probably would not certainly have put into a news release or into a prepared keynote for the iPhone or whatever the danger is.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think if you're one of those analysts is you like being on that call and if you really commit a faux pas, they will you again. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But that said, I think, I think that's always implied. Right, but, but that said, I mean last quarter I called out, in a piece I wrote, I called out a guy named Richard Kramer who's an analyst at areit Research who like, literally there were like nine questions about tariffs. And then he said, I'm not going to ask about tariffs. What about the problems with Apple intelligence? And I'm like, bravo. And I called him out. I was like, this guy is the MVP of this call. Because he, he asked about that and he, and his follow up was about court cases that might affect Apple's business. And he, I mean he literally sent me an email not to tell tales out of school, but he sent me an email afterwards saying thank you for noticing that. I like the only one who asked them any questions like yeah, keep, keep on doing it, dude.

[Leo Laporte]

You know who else noticed? Tim Cook noticed.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We'll see if Richard Kramer is there this time, you know, but, but good gold star for him. I mean, good job.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, I think that what's interesting is when it, when folks can answer those hard questions effectively, they just look so much better. Like, I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make is we all want softballs. And the softballs, well, everyone knows what you're going to answer with the softballs. And you know, some of the folks that we, you know, worked with in the past, you know, the, like, I think that, you know, well, Barack Obama is very good at it. Like, you know, you can throw anything at him and he will just come back. Like no matter how hard it is, he's just going to hit it back.

[Leo Laporte]

JFK was like that too.

[Alex Lindsay]

Just amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Diffuse it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, well, he wouldn't tell. I mean, but Barack Obama would hear you. He, he was say it and then he would just come back to you with an answer. And, and it was just, you know, and it was spot on and it was more inspiring than the softballs that he was getting and the.

[Leo Laporte]

But, and I don't want to fit Apple executives or any executive that way.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, no, but, but okay, one, I agree with that. I think, I think one company that's really, was really good at it was John Leger and, and T Mobile. So John, he did his, his quarterlies. You know, he let a lot of people say, ask him a lot of things and he just shot from the hip and just said the way it was going to be. And, and I think that was part of the swashbuckler kind of feel that T Mobile had at the moment, at that moment that he gave them because he was willing to answer. Now he had a ton of information in front of him that was kind of constantly being, you know, coming up to him. So he can, you know, respond with a lot of Detail like what you don't see in those, those calls depending on what. I don't know what Apple's looks like but in a lot of those calls there are like eight huge monitors on a wall that are in front of them with the social stuff that's being said while they're doing it. The data, data points for that specific question. Like everyone knows what the questions are going to be, right? I mean they know there's like eight.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Universe of questions that could be asked.

[Alex Lindsay]

Is you've got a team that's sitting there going, firing them up into a monitor in front of them so that they, they have all of the pertinent data because they can't say the data wrong.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I always pictured them like sliding a piece of paper in front of Tim Cook. But you're right, it's probably on the big screen.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know. Again, I have no idea what Apple might be getting. Paper. I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You used to.

[Jason Snell]

Is he wearing a Vision Pro?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Let me tell you, this is. Nobody cares about this but me. But I care.

[Alex Lindsay]

How is Apple not doing them in.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You can hear the wrestling of paper in the Apple thing. You can hear it. You can hear them like where they're pulling things out and Tim's looking it up and saying oh, these numbers here. Because again they, at Andy's point, they don't want to be wrong. They don't want to be seen as like fibbing because yeah, it's a legal requirement here. So, so they don't, they don't want to do that at all. I agree. I think that, I think it's better if you answer these questions. That's the thing I liked about Richard Kramer's question is like, come on. Like I think everybody thinking Apple, if everybody's thinking about Apple Intelligence, I. And here's the thing, they have a question ready to go. They have an answer. They know what their official take is on where they are with Apple intelligence. That really boring. It might not be. Usually it's boring with a little hint of something interesting. But like if you don't ask the question, you're never going to know what a standard Apple response is.

[Alex Lindsay]

They would prefer to do an interview because they can be more flowery, which they do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right. There's always a CNBC person who does a pre interview that then they run right after the results.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want cnbc. They want. I just.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They have control.

[Leo Laporte]

They want, they want something a little.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh Leo, trust me, the CNBC interview is not hard hitting in any way because they get the exclusive. See that's the thing is they get the, they get the embargoed pre release exclusive with Tim. And I'm not saying that that person isn't a journalist. I'm just saying that like it is a, it is a platform conducive for Apple to get its, its best thoughts out to the investment community. And that is, it is what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the things that will probably be a bright light of course will be service. Apple has expanded AppleCareOne to include a new multi device warranty care one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, AppleCare is even more of a service.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

What do we think? Is this a good idea?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Depends on what the products are. Depending on your product set, you can save money with this and it provides.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S really for people who have multiple devices, right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes. And it provides coverage for some devices that currently you might not be able to get coverage on because you didn't opt for AppleCare. And then you can actually AppleCare plus and you can add it in. Even for older, some older devices you got to do some. I mean unfortunately it's not as transparent as it should be in terms of like doing your shopping and seeing what the, the prices are because there are definitely some where adding it to an AppleCare one is more than just paying the AppleCare plus on its own and you shouldn't do that. But there are other, other cases where you can save money on this. So it's a, so for three devices.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S an additional 20 bucks a month.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It depends on what the devices are the, you know, Macs versus iPads versus like AirPods. But you can add those devices in and you can potentially save some money if you're, if you're a regular user of Apple Care plus for all your devices it is absolutely worth looking into this to see if it will save you money. Obviously from Apple's perspective they're hoping that in net what it's going to do is increase the number of devices covered by AppleCare plus which means they're increasing their revenue. And I'll just point out since we were talking about Apple Financials that we never talk about this but one of the I'd say decent lines of revenue for services is AppleCare Plus. Like that is services revenue. It's old school services revenue. But it is a way that Apple makes money is selling you Apple Care plus. And again it's insurance. Right. It is calibrated so that what they pay out in replacement is less than what they bring in in fees. And so, but still, if you want to be protected and I, I know people who love it and I know people who never ever use it, but if you are a regular AppleCare person, you know, you got to look at this because it will probably save you money.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can see a comparison on Apple's website with AppleCare plus and AppleCare 1. 20 bucks a month, up to three products. It looks like it's any three products. As long as it's, you know, in the coverage.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, as long as they're on your. As long as they're associated with your Apple account.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Which means like if, if you've got a kid with their own Apple ID, their iPhone is not on your account. But if you've got a kid with a Mac, you could log in a separate user with your account and then accounts. I mean there's some, there's some weird hinky things in here, but like that's why, that's why, unfortunately the best advice is that everybody needs to explore this to see if it's right for them because some people will save money and in some circumstances with some products and you kind of just got to try it out. But you know, they're also, I, I applaud the idea of a one stop shop that, you know, I would rather have one subscription to this than five.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Really, I should talk to Lisa. I mean we could easily. I've got three products on my own. She's got at least three. Three. So we, you know, but still, I never buy Apple Care, so I don't, I don't know if it's a good deal for me.

[Alex Lindsay]

See, I buy AppleCare. I mean, I've stopped buying it for my Mac Minis and stuff like that because they just don't ever get hurt. But my laptops and my iPads and my phones, for a long time we never came up short on our Apple coverage. And being able to just bring it in and hand it to somebody and get something back, we was pretty addicting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So for instance, if you have a Vision Pro. Oh, it's time for a Vision Pro segment. It's going to be really short. This is literally one item. If you have a Vision Pro, Apple Care plus is 25 bucks a month. Month Apple Care One with the same coverage. Right. Is 20 bucks a month.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Boom. You save $5 on your $3,500 helmet.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so right there, anyway, it's probably worth going to the Apple Care support page.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, you got, you got to just step through it with your own devices. And see whether it's going to save you money or not. But if you're.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not going to save me money because I never buy Apple.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I never buy AppleCare either. AppleCare plus, you know, extended warranties. But there's some people whom it makes sense. I honestly. We all know those people. We all know those people. We all have friends who have the negative energy field around them that sort of like chaos energy that exists and exudes in every way. And software crashes and computers fall off stands and phones shatter into a million pieces. And those people should have Apple Gear plus, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

FX Guide has a first look at immersive test footage from the Ursa Cine Immersive.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Hold on. First off. Well, we're still in the Vision Pro segment. So this is the sub segment, which is the alert alert Alex camera segment.

[Alex Lindsay]

I haven't, haven't had time to go through this yet. But I do have an enormous amount of respect for Mike Seymour. We've been friends for a long time. So I'm excited to dig into it. It just came out, I think just today or maybe yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's brand new. Yeah. Okay. So a few days ago.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's going to be it. I'm sure that it's going to be great. And you're going to see more of this.

[Leo Laporte]

So this isn't really anything like entertainment. This is just so you can see what it would look like.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. FX guide and FX PhD are. These are the, I mean, they dig deep into how these, you know, how the cameras work and how the systems work and everything else. And so this is probably going to be, you know, some good content to work with.

[Leo Laporte]

So I lied. There's two Vision Pro stories.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Thanks, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

There even could be a third if you want to say. Sundar Prachat guy also agrees with Tim Cook that the phone is still going to matter for a little while.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it's going to take time. I mean, all of these technologies take a.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, you already said this, didn't you? So this is.

[Jason Snell]

I slid it, but yeah, but that's. I'm glad that someone. I'm glad that. I'm just surprised he said two or three years because I'm thinking at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Five or three is not that long, is it?

[Jason Snell]

Well, but it's just that I have such a problem, problem figuring out that all the stuff that you rely on for your phone, which is not just mobile. I'm. Hey, I'm having fun outside living my lifestyle of the push button world of the future. I'M talking about, like, I need to do my banking, I need to do this, I need to do that. Like actual, like, desktops. What would have been a desktop task, like, just 10 years ago. And I can't imagine that being, like, a really good application running on a pair of glasses. So I can't imagine it not being the center of the. Of the experience until there's a real churn in and how society deals with computing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that the other thing, though, when we think about this, you have to think about AI in parallel to it, in gentic AI, specifically in the sense that I find myself now, I've been playing with it, and I can see I'm not doing it yet, but I'm playing with. I could see telling my AI agent to go do something for me. And I don't think about any. Like, go buy me. Here's the deal. I need you to buy Southwest. I need some Southwest tickets for whatever. Go look for these. Go tell me what the options are. And then when it gives me the options, I say, just buy the one on Saturday or whatever. And it just does all that. Like. Like, I. So I think that there's a lot of explicit things that we think of doing with computing that I'm starting to realize is going to go away. You know, like that we're going to not, you know, we're not going to explicitly have to go typing into a web page to do something. We're going to ask an agent to go do some research for us or do this thing for us, or bring us back the, you know, whatever that is, and then ask them to just go execute it like you would have, in sense, a assistant, you know, And I was, you know, I was talking to a programmer who, you know, is a very senior programmer that has left, you know, left their company and started playing with AI. And they're like, basically, I have a team of 15 people. Like, I just have 15 agents that are all, you know, and I'm. I'm having them all work on different parts of.

[Leo Laporte]

You say people, but they're not people. They're.

[Alex Lindsay]

He's like, no, he's like, I got 50 AI, AI units that are all doing different things. They're a team and they're. And they're all. They're all figuring out. And they, you know, they're all. We're figuring out how to do, but that's someone who knows what they're doing. We're going to get to a point where people who, who don't. I mean, for Me still. I have what we call Janet. You know, Janet is, you know, constantly talking to Janet. And we don't even talk about ChatGPT anymore. I'm just like my wife and I will have some conversation. Well, just ask Janet later and we'll find out whether what's. You know, what's what there.

[Leo Laporte]

And you call Chat GPT Janet. Just to be clear from.

[Alex Lindsay]

From the good place. You know, from Janet. From the good place. So Janet. ChatGPT has just become Janet. And so we just. We just. Because both. All of us use it in our shortcuts and anyway, but the, The. But I think that we're gonna. That's where a lot of this stuff makes more sense. Because when you're just dealing with audio or just dealing. And I, I didn't think I'd get there, but now I'm doing most things where I'm. When I'm responding to people in text, I am dictating more and more of it because the audio, because the voice to text has gotten so good. It's easier for me to just say it than it is for me to try type it, you know, at this point. And so, so I think that that's. That's where a lot of this. But I think it's still five years away, minimum.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think Sundar is. Is trying to not demotivate his people who are working on this stuff and they're true believers. But I think it's. I think we're talking about way further out there.

[Leo Laporte]

And the reason, I think so too, two to three years seems a very short.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. First off, I am a little more skeptical about AI than Alex is. But secondly, I think the bottom line is you are going to want to have some. Somebody or something on your person that has a fast Internet connection, probably has some pretty good compute and maybe optionally a display in case you want to see a picture or check that text to make sure that it reflects what.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re saying, what you're describing sounds similar to a smartphone.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, this is what I'm saying is like even if you add in lots of AI agents and you add in glasses or you add in smart headphones or you add in whatever it is, I feel like you could. If those other products are going to get weighed down by adding compute and adding battery and adding sensors and. And then they don't screen part.

[Leo Laporte]

Just describe the Vision Pro.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So this is what I'm saying is like in the long run, I feel like the smartphone survives because first off, everybody's got it and Second, it is a much better beachhead from which to add accessories that talk to it, that use its power to do stuff. And that's why I just kind of feel like keeping something on it. Like we like you carry around a wallet or something. Like it's, it's just a bundle of net connectivity, battery and compute power. And then, and then it, and then the world, you know, unfolds around you.

[Leo Laporte]

When you can wear your glasses.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So I feel like that's going to be harder to replace because the miniaturization and efficiency in terms of battery tech and it's going to be a lot harder to replace that.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think, I think, I think you're right. Five years from now, I think 10 years from now when I've got my, you know, my four solar powered robots doing most of the farm work for me, you know, you know, like when I live in the middle of nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Check those moisture harvesters because I have.

[Andy Ihnatko]

A feeling they're on the blank.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Or you take out the red barchetta before the motor law came into effect. Is that what's going on now?

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I wasn't expecting to make a rush reference, but there it is.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I do wear, I was wearing this AI device that was collecting everything that happened around me audio wise, sending it to the phone, admittedly for AI processing. Then Amazon bought them. This is the B computer. So I just got my limitless pin which does basically the same thing, but again it needs a phone. The nice thing is it's a microphone you hang around your neck so it's picking up everything.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Look, if you have a choice of making a really burdened heavy thing like the Humane pin, that's got cellular in it and it's got 12 struggles with battery problems and all of that, or guess what, an accessory to the device that you have in everybody's pocket. I know what I'm choosing. The problem with that, here's the problem with that. And the Humane pin is a great example of this. The problem with that is who gates your entire experience then Apple and Google. And that is a problem because it means that if you're chat, if you're OpenAI with chat GPT, if you're Johnny, I've developing something, you're like, like I don't, I don't really want to put a battery in a 5G modem in this thing, but I also don't really want to go through Apple or Google. What do you do? And it's just, it's going to be a challenge, but I just, I think the smartphone is too good. I think the smartphone is such a great product that it will be very hard to get more likely to build accessories on top of it than to kick it to the curb for a decade at least, if not more.

[Leo Laporte]

We got to give credit to Neil Pert for Red Barchetta. As long as. As long as you're going to. As long as you mentioned that, sure.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's a.

[Leo Laporte]

This is hysterical. It's taken from a 1973 road and track short story describing a future in which increasingly stringent safety regulations have forced cars to evolve into something called massive modern safety vehicles capable of withstanding a 50 mile an hour impact without injury. Consequently, there's always the consequences. Drivers of MSVs have become less safety conscious and more aggressive. Aggressive and intentionally bounce older, smaller cars off the road.

[Andy Ihnatko]

In the, in the song Red Barchetta, it's basically like they've outlawed gas cars and maybe sports cars. And this uncle lives out on a farm and he eludes the eyes because it's definitely a panopticon like police state. And they, and they, and they drive this, this rev. This old fashioned gas car around in the fields and the roads and whatever and then go back and hide it again because it's not legal to drive.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a brilliant red sports car from a better vanished.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that's right. It's. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, God bless Neil Peart.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Rush is one of those bands that was like, right. And they were writing sci fi stories as rock songs. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Raised the quality of lyrics for rock and roll music.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah. Rip. He was, he was, he was a special one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's your Vision Pro segment.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I love it. More Rush in the Vision Pro segment.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we to need. Need that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Some people say they need more cowbell, but generally you always need more Rush.

[Leo Laporte]

Always need more Rush.

[Jason Snell]

Have you, have you seen Neil Pert's drum setup? He has more cowbell on that thing than has on cow.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I, I saw. In the 80s I saw Rush three times and wow, jealous. And by the third time that they came to the Civic arena in Pittsburgh, I had figured out that you don't buy expensive tickets. You buy limited view tickets. And so the limited view tickets would be like 12 do. And the reason is because they were behind the drum set. So if you got the limited view ones, you just got to sit right behind and it was really close to the, to the stage and so you got to sit right behind Neil Peart and watch him play. And that's. Oh my God, the other side of them.

[Jason Snell]

So I just sat there just.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you've ever, if you ever. Like when I was growing up, I don't know what it's like now, but Tom Sawyer was what every drum drummer needed to know how to do. Like, you know, like, like you. If no one took you serious, like you're not a real drummer until you could do Tom Sawyer, you know, and the whole solo perfectly, you know, and, and so, but, but what's amazing if you haven't seen, by the way, the documentary on Rush.

[Leo Laporte]

It is Happy birthday Getty Lee. Today is his birthday.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My college roommates who got me into. Into Russian. Getty Lee, a huge sports fan, huge Toronto Blue Jays fan. And recently there were some great stories about how he's auctioning off all of his. His collection because I think his wife would like to move to a house that doesn't have that much so many baseballs.

[Leo Laporte]

To be honest, having seen the Blue Jays in Toronto, you'd have to be a big fan to be.

[Jason Snell]

I do have to, I do have to encourage everybody to go on YouTube. Neil Pert was on the Letterman show when they had drum solo week where everything for an entire two or three times that for an entire week, every night they'd have a different drummer doing a drum solo with a band. And Neil Pert brought his entire kit. 360 degrees of everything you could hit with a stick.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jason Snell]

And it was the most amazing performance ever.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a big drum kit. Look at that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Did they want to film afterward and say is this a rental? Because that's a thing that he always did.

[Jason Snell]

No, I think, I think he said now, after, after the show, G Stage Neil will give everybody a ride in his spaceship.

[Alex Lindsay]

By the way, when they, when they remastered Chronicles, they, they did they redid Tom Sawyer and Atmos. And it is so I get to I for what I do for work. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it good?

[Alex Lindsay]

You like it? I preview Atmos stuff in a big theater, like a full size theater about once a week. And my. How I set my palette every, every, every time I do it is the first song on my playlist that I'm testing besting as Tom Sawyer. And it just lights up an entire theater. Like, you know, like, it's just. It's so good, you know, Makes me want to do Lizarium too.

[Jason Snell]

And I'm not ashamed to say that I found I first learned about Getty Lee and Rush because of the Bob and Doug McKenzie album, because J. Lee soloed on the hit single part of the album. I never heard of him before. Said, ooh, that's right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's very Canadian to get Geddy Lee in there.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't know. There isn't an award every week to. To the person who derails the show the most, but if there was, I think I just want it. So.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, man.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'd like to thank the Academy.

[Jason Snell]

It's not about the awards, Jason. It's about the satisfaction of having made an impact.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I have to say I owe the game my appreciation for Rush to believe it or not. Adam Sandler, who played Tom Sawyer in one of his movies, forced his friend to play it with him. And I thought that's a pretty good song. I should listen to my.

[Alex Lindsay]

More of that, I think miners mostly. There's only one station that half. That half of Pittsburgh watch listen to when I was growing up, which is WDVE. And so that was like literally 50% cube.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like it was so. It was so then there's a lot. It's a album oriented rock.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Led Zeppelin and Leonard Skynyrd and Rush.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's our rat hole for the.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I love it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I know, it's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Rat hole. This show is traditional.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been a rat hole.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

What would we do without the rat hole? You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason. And a special thank you to our club members who make this show possible. They make all our shows possible now. At least it told me the other day I was blown away that 25% of our operating costs come from club memberships. That means if we didn't have you, if we didn't have the club club, we'd have to cut 25% of our shows, 25% of our staff. And believe me, cutting 25% of Alex Lindsay would just be so hard. I don't know which quarter of him we would cut. So thank you, club members. 10 bucks a month. What do you get? Ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great place even when there aren't shows on. We talk all the time in the Club Twit Discord. You also get access to special events and show shows we don't do anywhere else. Our AI user group is Friday. That's been a really exciting thing. You know, we do an AI show on Wednesday, Intelligent machines. But the user group is really hands on and there are a lot of people in the club who are using AI for vibe coding and image design and stuff. So it's a really. In fact, Alex, you should come by and show us how you use Mid Journey sometime.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'd love to.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you ever available on a Friday at 2:00pm?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think I can make that work this Friday.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd love to see you because you do stuff with midjourney no one else can do. We are going to do the following Friday, August 8th. Stacy's Book Club Jason agrees. This is an incredible book. This is how youw Lose the Time War and it's short. It's really a novella. So you could read it now and be ready for August 8th. Highly recommended. It really is a wonderful, wonderful book. I listened to the audiobook version which is fantastic. Right after the book club. Chris Spring Marquardt his monthly photo segment. These are all club only events. We also make video available for a number of shows that are audio only in public like Hands on Apple, Hands on Windows, the Scott Wilkinson's Home Incredible Home Theater geeks this Week in Space. So you get video as well. We also do keynotes in the club only because we've been taken down once too many times. So for instance the Google Google Made by Google event coming up August 20th where they're going to announce the highly pre announced Pixel 10. We will see if the pre announcements are correct, which they were because they came from Google. Anyway, we'll do that event on Wednesday, August 20th. Micah's Crafting Corner I think I might do my button sewing in Crafting Corner. In fact I've promised the club Micah does this once a month. It's a very chill, relaxed place. He has lately been doing Lego Lego plants but you could do any kind of craft, coding, sewing, knitting, whatever you like to do. A number of people do cooking. I'm going to do buttoning. I am going to get a rag. I have ordered now a button sewing kit and the staple gun from Singer that staples buttons on. And we'll do a live chill comparison in Micah's Crafting Corner that's coming up August 20th. All of this by way of saying plan. Please join the club. There are lots of benefits for you and it's a huge benefit for us. Find out more at Twit TV Club Twits. There's a two week free trial if you want to see what it's like. There's corporate memberships. There's family plans too. Twit TV Club Twit. Thank you for your support on We Go with the show. Let's Map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, I'm departing from ATT and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the the House Bon Voyage.

[Leo Laporte]

Introducing Family Freedom Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days.

[Jason Snell]

Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits.

[Leo Laporte]

With finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 8 $29.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact Ever notice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

How ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free included with Prime. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and.

[Leo Laporte]

Safeway now through August 12th. Get big savings on your favorite products.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For the little ones in the family and earn four times points to use for discounts on groceries or on gas. Shop in store or online for items.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Earth's Best Yogurt Smoothie, Gerber Pouches, Happy Baby Pouches, Huggies Natural Baby Wipes, Pediasure Bottles, Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks and.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Gerber Yogurt melts snacks and earn four points.

[Leo Laporte]

Offer ends Aug. 12. Restrictions apply.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Offers may vary.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Let's see. Developers can now try Apple's kind of loosened up and I think this is because of the EU the rules for developers. They can now try special offers to persuade subscribers to stay. This benefits us, right? And it benefits developers. That's a good thing.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's the thing where if you try to cancel, say, well, what if we cut your monthly thing in half and or made it free for three months or, or what if we just simply. What if we just put a pause in your subscription for six months and then re Enabled it. Yeah, these are good things, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. UK is ready to join the pylon on Apple and Google. The British antitrust agency is looking at new European style controls for, for both Google and Apple in the uk, including EU style curbs on app stores. Apple said the new rules could hamper our ability to innovate and force us to give away our technology for free to foreigners. So there.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they basically declared Google and Apple together to be a co monopoly and therefore subject to like rules on behavior.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that is a little stretch. I mean usually monopoly means you own 80 or 90 percent of the market. If two companies own 80 or 90% of the market, they're a co monopoly. Unless they're colluding.

[Jason Snell]

No, I don't know. They're basically coming to the point where it doesn't matter that one platform has fewer desk. Excuse me, has fewer customers in the UK than others. It's not final. Final yet. They still get. It doesn't go into effect until, excuse me, Apple has until October to file a protest or again complain or make a very, very cogent argument about how this will harm the security and the privacy and the features that are offered to UK customers. But yeah, this is, it's, it's the next step towards what Apple would consider Armageddon.

[Leo Laporte]

UK doesn't have the best record in confrontations with Apple. They have now backed down, down on the request to Apple to provide unencrypted text from messaging, even for people outside the uk. Apple, remember, withdrew its advanced protection from the UK and now the UK says I'm sorry, never mind.

[Jason Snell]

After protests from the US government. So that was like, no, we're not going to let you spy on United States citizens or necessarily. Or government people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Actually the Director of National Intelligence said we have deals with the uk. This is not. This is not cool is what she said. No, she didn't say that, but she thought it. Blender is coming to the iPad. This might be very interesting. I've always found Blender difficult to use, Alex. It's a pretty good tool though, right? For 3D design for free.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's great. So you know, it's a good app. I mean it's a solid app. People can build, build with it. It doesn't cost anything to use it. There is. They've large donations from companies like Unreal as well as Apple. Apple is given to the blender.org because if you're trying to make sure that everyone can build geometry for your virtual world, having them not have to pay for it. Upfront is useful. So Blender has become kind of the, you know, they're getting funded by a large, lot of companies that want to see more geometry being generated. So, so that's great. And I think that, you know, obviously I don't think Apple gave them any directives, but obviously the money that they got probably made it easier to port.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we should be clear. I mean, Blender's always been available on the Mac, but this puts it on the.

[Alex Lindsay]

But for a long time. For a long time. And so the. And it, it's a good app. It's gotten much better. I mean, I think in the early days a lot of us looked at it kind of like, okay, well it's free. It's kind of like it was, it started off as kind of like gimp, you know, it was gimp.

[Leo Laporte]

It was hard to use.

[Alex Lindsay]

Greedy and weird and still a little weird, but not. But it's definitely gotten much better and much more mainstream as far as its tools. It's not going to replace something like if you're using Cinema4D for broadcast, it's not going to replace it. You know, most people are still using things like Maya and Houdini and so on, so for film work. But if you're like, I, I'm using blender for my 3D printing because I'm mostly because I'm trying to learn it, you know, and so I'm trying to learn Blender. And so when I'm. I force myself to model things in Blender, which is, I'm getting better at it. And, and I think it's harder who.

[Leo Laporte]

Have used other platforms in the standard platform because it's kind of non standard. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's got a lot of standard stuff in it. I mean, if you're doing subdivision, you know, it doesn't do nurbs, which I grew up working with.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm kind of nerves, man. Non uniform, rational.

[Alex Lindsay]

Beep spines is where it's all at. And so I'm used to having a little bit more control over what I'm doing than what I have there. But overall it does that. And again, it's always just like learning the interface, like what are the quick keys and what are the facts? You know, how do I get to this over here? And I have to admit that thing that's working for me really well is again, chatgpt. I sit there and go, how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? And it just says and because Blender is so Scriptable. Sometimes if I'm lazy, I'll just borrow somebody script. I'll ask ChatGPT and ChatGPT, would you like me to build a script for you? And I was like, nice, yes. And boom. It just gives me a script that builds the object.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's the Blender folks say, you know, we wanted to offer a touch interface. So we're looking not just at the iPad, but the Surface and the matepad pad and the Wacom moving pad so that people can use it makes sense. Touch devices to do this 3D design.

[Jason Snell]

And it'll extend to more people. I mean, one of the nicest things about Blender is that there's a huge community behind it. So, like, if you do want. If you do want to start learning it, there's no shortage of tutorials on how to do it. I mean, the standard thing is, like, you. There's a. There's a donut tutorial that's kind of famous. Gets updated, like, every single year. This one blends. Blender user that just takes you to, okay, here's how you make a donut and then say, okay, let's add sprinkles to the donut. Now you. Now you. Now you understand, like, particles, like, okay, now let's change the lighting on the donut. Now let's give frosting onto the donut.

[Leo Laporte]

And we'll just call it a Toroid. I'm hungry. I did. The donut thing is.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just. Just a fact about Blender that's fun is that this year's best animated feature, which is called Flow in the at the Oscars, was made entirely in Blender.

[Leo Laporte]

That is pretty impressive. That's very cool. Yeah. Made on Blender. Blender guru, according to Nightscape, in our Club is the YouTube channel to watch if you want to learn, learn how to use Blender. Wow. They made Flow all in Blender. It's pretty beautiful.

[Alex Lindsay]

You can do a lot with it. I mean, it is a very powerful, powerful app. Again, if you talk to someone who uses Maya or Houdini, they'll be like, well, or Cinema 4D for certain things. They'll be like, well, there's, like, a lot of things missing in those areas. But overall, can you tell a great story? Can you build a lot of stuff for free? Yeah, yeah, it's. It's very functional. Yeah, Very, very functional.

[Jason Snell]

I love it. Just because the. That you think back to when you were, like, a teenager, when you were in junior high, in high school, the amount of free time you had to be absolutely obsessed with something that you were fascinated by. The number. So the number. The generation of kids that is, are basically learning 3D modeling and animation and film making with these kinds of tools. They're going. It's just going to be phenomenal what they do when they become an adult. And now they're making. Now they have access to the big boy tools because they didn't just simply have to start learning at 23, 24. It's like, no, they think in terms of how to animate this way and how to populate a scene this way, and it's going to be fascinating.

[Alex Lindsay]

And Blender's gotten more aggressive about, you know, how they're going to work with AI because it's so scriptable. The AI ties into it fairly effectively as far as building geometry and so on and so forth and. And geometric. There's, you know, there's a lot of scenario AI. I think scenario AI is really getting going pretty far with being able to generate really articulated 3D models from AI. And so as you start to see that happen, that's really going to change a lot of things. Of being able to just say, I want a pizza or I want a house or a car and not get it. Some kind of like, weird piling of polygons, but actual wheels and things that you could animate and everything else. And then what's going to happen, of course, is that you'll be able to, you know, mix your animation with, you know, with AI adding things. Like, the interesting thing about motion capture, for instance, is it's really easy to capture someone doing a fight scene. You know, like doing big moves. It's really hard to animate them standing, waiting for a bus. So, like, that's the hard thing to animate because there's so much. These subconscious little things we're doing to maintain our balance to that are our personality. You know, if anyone's ever. If you've ever looked at someone way off in the distance, you know it's them. Your eyes don't know that yet, but just by the way they're walking, you understand who they are. You don't know why that is, but you'll know that that's them. And that's the kind of stuff that, you know, these subtleties that AI will eventually be able to add something that's a certain character to that you don't. That an animator can worry about the bigger picture and be able to have it fill in a lot of the other bits and pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

And to. Not to contradict what I said about it being hard to learn. The float team of young animators learned how to use Blender in a week, so that's pretty good. Blender's grease pencil was also used in effects for Spider man. So I guess it's being used more and more in some. This is the across the universe version of Spider Man. It's being used in more and more.

[Alex Lindsay]

Interesting ways in something that's more animated like that. It makes sense. It was when you start doing like visual effects that it. It is a little.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Blender plus AI though. That sounds kind of interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think we get a lot of 3D plus AI pretty soon. But, but Blender plus AI because it's so scriptable at the right. In its core. There's a lot of opportunity in Blender that might be harder in other. Other apps.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Flow website has their workflow, if you will, on how they use used Blender. So that sounds kind of cool. All right, what else? What else is hot and exciting? Adobe has added some new generative AI features for Photoshop.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, they started charging for it too.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that.

[Alex Lindsay]

So they definitely added some features. I hadn't been doing a bunch of stuff and I'm just used to having Photoshop do all this stuff for me. And I have to admit, it started saying, you're now using this, these credits. And I have to say, as someone who's used Photoshop for a long time, you know, like, to me, my subscription that I pay, I don't know how much a month for, to me was like, I get to use that should cover it. Should cover it. And now that they're, now that they're giving me credits, if I run out of credits, it's probably a month or two before I stop using Photoshop. Like, you know, like it's, you know, like it's. I haven't run into that yet. It's still generating it, but it suddenly created this level of stress for me that I didn't have before. And I was just like, well, this might be. Be the end after, you know, 25 or actually almost 35 years. This might be the end of my Photoshop usage. If it. Because the only reason I'm still there is because of the gen AI. I mean, I can do everything else in other apps.

[Leo Laporte]

I found a Lightroom for iOS subscription for 60 bucks a year. That seems. I thought that was worth it on my iPad. So I did pay for that. And you get five credits, I think in the generative AI thing on Photoshop.

[Jason Snell]

Lightroom on mobile is. Is just Amazing. It's, it's the difference between the picture and I'm talking about any, any phone, how good it is. It will not, probably not take a picture the way that you imagined it is. And Lightroom will. Lightroom mobile. It makes it so easy to turn it into the thing that you thought it the, the reason, turn it into the reason why you took that picture. And so for me, like just that is worth the money. And I, I just, I just think that we're starting to see, see a lot of companies realizing exactly how much compute that all these AI generative features are costing them and trying to figure out is there a way that we can take the features that we can give away as part of the subscription and separate out the ones that are so expensive that we really do have to at least have at least encourage people to use them for things that they actually value and not actually screw around.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little mismatch in the market because OpenAI has raised so many billions of dollars that they can continue to give away stuff, whereas Adobe hasn't. And they're using their own models, Firefly. And so it's really costing them. And they don't have that deep pool of money that some of these other companies, these startups have. Yeah, well, and so I can see why they charge.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean they don't have, they have to charge money for people charging, you know, $90 a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Not as deep a pool, I gotta tell you.

[Jason Snell]

Well, it depends on what you're. I, I, I'm paying something like less than $20 for my.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is a stealth. Everybody slack doing this too. Like everybody, everybody is using AI as an excuse to just raise prices.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And some of them there is AI cost. Right. But like I'll just, you know, Adobe G gives me because I'm on the Photoshop plan, they give me cloud storage that I do not want. Yeah, they keep shoving it at me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't want any, I don't.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Want the that too. But like it's a thing that they can put on a checklist. And now with this AI thing, it's another thing they can put on a checklist. The weird thing about this too that I think is really unfortunate is there is apparently a plan level that is a different price that doesn't have the AI stuff in it. But regular customers don't get it. Only existing customers, new customers won't be able to see it. And to Alex's point, Adobe has done a good job with a bunch of generative stuff. But like the idea that, that it's all going to be this credit based barter system when you're already paying, paying a large amount of money every month or year for your Adobe products. I don't know. I mean if it's an excuse to upcharge everybody and make more profit, I.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can see that if someone was using it more than me then, you know, like if they were using it every hour of every day and they're pushing it, they may want to be. So if.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Stop abuse.

[Alex Lindsay]

I haven't figured out where the, where the ceiling is yet, but if the ceiling is somewhere, you know, like if the ceiling is high enough, it might not bother me. But if I start hitting the ceiling with my regular opportunity, which I'm not a huge, huge. I'm not. I used to spend all day in Photoshop, I don't spend all day in Photoshop anymore. So it's usually an hour or two on average a day that I might be in there doing something the. But if that starts to become something that's impacted, I can definitely see myself going. Well, I can. There's lots of generative fill that I can do somewhere else. It's not as convenient as Photoshop, but I could, you know, there's lots of places that can do it. I mean, these days, you know. Yeah, I mean what you can do.

[Jason Snell]

All I want to say is that I'm not ready yet to ascribe this to Adobe. Just looking for ways to upcharge. I need to know a little bit more about how much they're spending for whatever they're. I don't know who they're using for compute, whether it's Google or Amazon or Azure or whatever like that. But I can definitely see with a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do here that I don't know any generative AI tools that doesn't either put a cap on how many things you can generate or charges extra for extra access. Like I've been using VO3 on my Google paid account and there's still a cap on how many clips you're allowed to do within a certain timeframe before you have to start paying extra. And I don't. Maybe it's because I'm in on the ground floor and I'm getting. I started off with this under understanding of how these things, how you pay for these things instead of like my bucking and simply saying, oh well, these should be free or these should be part of like a $20 plan. But I do associate the high level of expense in generating this stuff with. Not something that I should be getting necessarily for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I'm excited. My iPhone is now iOS 26 and my mom is speaking in tongues, which is pretty, pretty cool. Cool. That is the weird. It just looks like gum or something. All right, anyway. Hi, mom. She speaks so many languages now. It's pretty cool. Look at that. Look at that. Anyway, I'm excited now. I'm going to put all of the texts asking for money and offering me a job into that unknown, I never heard of you folder.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Put them in the hole.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it in the hole. The texts hole. Mom, you really, really reach. Reach the. Oh, she's going the other way now. Right to left. Right to left. Look at that. Wow. Chinese.

[Jason Snell]

Does. Does the liquid flow from right to left even in English? If it's. You're in Australia.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. My goats down the.

[Jason Snell]

Must be. That must be a developer doc.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Mom is in a golden cloud. I don't know what. What continent. Hola. Hey. I don't. I want to just kind of leave this. I like it. Mom's saying hi to everybody. Let's see what else before we go. Are you excited about Pluribus? That is the weirdest trailer, but I love it that Rhea is in it. Vince Gilligan's new science fiction drama, Rhea Seehorn, who was wonderful and Better Call Saul, stars in a. Well, I don't know. All I saw was her licking toroids.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, there's a weird. There's a weird premise. I mean, I think the rumor is that the premise is like there's a happiness plague that is spreading and the one unhappy person in the world has to try and stop it, which is hilarious. If you're. If you're wondering why the Breaking Bad Guy is making a sci fi series for Apple tv, tv, I'll just point out that he is one of the people who came out of the X Files. So he's got a. He's got a background in this kind of way. Weird sci fi stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't realize that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Vince Gilligan was one of the producers on the X Files. And. And so I think this is a genre that he's very comfortable with, and I'm looking forward to that. And also the fact that Apple seems to be really leaning into the fact that you can make some really great, dramatic, high quality, modern sci fi on tv. And I. I don't. I don't know if there's a better story source for great sci fi shows on TV right now than Apple tv. Plus, honestly, they have a really great catalog, a bunch of great stuff that they're doing. Yeah, it's pretty. Pretty nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Pretty weird, though, that, like, this isn't. This isn't like, part of the Breaking Bad universe, but it does take place in Albuquerque. That.

[Leo Laporte]

Was there an Aztec in it? I don't.

[Jason Snell]

It must be that.

[Leo Laporte]

He know.

[Jason Snell]

He knows the infrastructure. He trusts the infrastructure. He knows how to shoot in that town crew and.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And. And sets and all of that. I mean, a lot of stuff. This is a thing that doesn't get talked about enough. But, like, a lot of creative decisions are made because, you know, the people or you know, the facilities. Like, this is the famous. Like, why did Magnum PI exist? It's because Hawaii 5o went off the air and they wanted to use the sets and stuff in Hawaii. And then when Magnum PI Went off, why did Jake and the fat man move to Hawaii for season two? And the answer is because they wanted to use that infrastructure. When Lost went off the air, why did they do a new Hawaii 5O and Magnum PI and the answer is because they had this whole infrastructure they had built for Lost shooting on Oahu. And so. And that happens now. That happens in Atlanta. That happens in Albuquerque. That's happening in parts of England. In the Doctor who phenomenon is why they shoot shop shows in Cardiff in Wales. Now, like, once you get a cluster of professionals and studio space and all of that, you kind of are like, why would I not use those people and go back to that place? Especially if it was your show that set it up to be, your two shows that set it up to begin.

[Leo Laporte]

There's still that pizza up on the roof that, you know, it's been sitting there for years.

[Jason Snell]

That poor homeowner, New Mexico people come.

[Leo Laporte]

To that house, right? And they throw. And they try to throw pizzas on up on the roof. This was a scene from Breaking Bad where Bryan Cranston gets upset and it's the biggest pizza I ever saw, and sails it up onto the roof where it sits. And apparently people go to that house thing to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm sure that adds a lot of value to the house. Yeah, I mean, you know, New Mexico was one of the first tax cut. Tax credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Now we know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now we know. And so they were able to build. That's why you see a lot of stuff out of Albuquerque or the. Or designed around the. The desert, because they have a lot of. They have. And so they're one of the first ones out there. They built up a lot of infrastructure Netflix has massive stages there as well as other. As a lot of general stages. Same thing that, as Jason said, Atlanta, Louisiana, those are the big, probably the big three states. There's other folks that try. California tries to keep up. They're trying to build their own. They have their own tax credit system. The limit was too low, so the ceiling was too low. They're bringing that, that sealing up. The problem is, is that there are so many rules about how to do things in LA now as well. There's a lot of. In the, in the movie industry, there's a lot of discussion about the rules. And, and because of that, the way the rules are set up in combination with California tax law, on top of the brakes, it's actually someone will. Someone said, I. It's cheaper to shoot in London than it is in LA and fly your entire LA crew to London to shoot than it is in la. So all the. That's why a lot of this work is going to other, other states right now. Because, you know, so it's, it's a. And New Mexico is a huge benefactor of that process. But that's why a lot of stuff happens in Albuquerque or Arizona or Wyoming. Like all of those are Albuquerque, you know, they're all, you know, they're all there. Shot in the desert.

[Leo Laporte]

Did. Did Bryan Cranston know that the pizza was going to stay on the roof or do you think. Or here's the. Here's the. I'm going to show a little clip. I have to show. Just.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't have your computer screen, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. All right, there we go. Now you do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'll forget it.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a little, A little clip of the pizza.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Pizza.

[Leo Laporte]

That's got to be the most. You can't plan that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Fun fact. That was actually not planned. That just happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because otherwise you'd have to do a thousand takes. Takes.

[Jason Snell]

Because I imagine, like them just putting it like 24, 30 pizzas like all standing by. And the crew said, please get over the third take.

[Leo Laporte]

Please throw more pizzas. Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But that was the winner because of what happens to the pizza there. If I own that house, I would probably have a, you know, a fake pizza there. Just put it. Everybody up.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it.

[Jason Snell]

That's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

She actually had to get a fence up because two meetings were visiting and she was getting harassed. Yeah. You hear those stories about anybody. It's true of like the Full House House in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's on Alamo Street.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Anybody who's, who's had like, anything the, the what was it? We drove by the. In. In Boulder, the Mork and Mindy house. And like, that's. That's 40 years ago, 50 years ago almost. So the.

[Jason Snell]

The owners. The owners of Cary's Brown Brown house in Sex and the City got actual permission to install, like, wrought iron gates, which is not. Which is associated with. Because too many people were, oh, I got to get a picture on Carrie's steps.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And they're like, I got a. I got a baby. I got to get in my house now. Get out of my way.

[Leo Laporte]

One more story before we go to our picks of the week, but I just got to ask you. This. IPhone 17 spotted in the wild. Is this BS or is this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, that's totally true. They have those in wraps in that they take them out and they. And they do testing, and they're in big cases, so you can't see any. Anything about the design. Although I think there's a mistake here where they got the shot of the cameras and the. And the sensors, and that's sort of the giveaway that that's an iPhone, but that's.

[Jason Snell]

It's. It's easier to spot because the camera. The camera bar is now so prominent and so different. Yeah, I think the. I think the person. The person who reported it was also saying there was also a guy who was kind of hovering around, trying to, like, give the body.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Man. Yep.

[Jason Snell]

It is big, thick case.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Yeah. They're covering up because they want to cover up. It's just like wrapping a car or something. Like, they want to cover up. So you don't know what the silhouette is, and you don't know what the color is and all that. Now, why he's out there, I don't know. But they do go out. They. They definitely do go out, but they're all kind of, like, covered up.

[Alex Lindsay]

And, like, as he. He's. I assume he's not Apple, like, but then how does he get the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's an Apple employee.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Got to be an Apple employee.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, you know, they. You know, they say that you can do anything you want at Apple on your last day.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. All right. There we go.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Good luck to that guy.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, good luck.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's going to be a really short trip.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? They said, look, go out and do qc. You got to go do test.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If he was. If he was ordered to do it and he got ambushed, then he's fine. You know, if he was like, I'm gonna sneak out with the phone. And then.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I don't think it's sneak out the phone. Even if he had it, like, you'd be pretty careful. Careful about opening it up. I mean, I don't.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. But you know, I do think that they know that there's going to be. This is not the first time this has happened. Like, if you're out in the wild, if somebody was granted the permission to take an iPhone out in public, you do risk this, like.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's part of it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This broke this morning from Mark Gurman. Apple has lost yet another AI researcher to Meta's super intelligence intelligence team. Bowen Jiang, who was really great on Saturday Night Live, has now apparently is an AI engineer. No, I'm just joking. He works in the multimodal AI division at Apple set to join Meta. He is following his former boss, Roaming Pang and also Tom Gunter, Mark Lee. We've talked about that. Pang was rumored to get more than $200 million to jump ship.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I congratulate whatever Meta HR person is a good friend of Mark Gurman. Are we going to get this? Every job, like everybody who moves out of Apple's AI group apparently gets a Mark Gurman story now.

[Leo Laporte]

Although. Although, you know, I think he's getting it from LinkedIn sometimes, right? The people post it on LinkedIn. Could be, yeah. I've got a new job.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm hundreds of millions of dollars in that organization who are telling him that those people are leaving. And he's probably got people in the new organization who are saying that person is coming. And yeah, he's wired. He's got it.

[Jason Snell]

Who in the Bay Area has just bought a solid gold hat? Does. Does he work for Apple?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, just so we have a good thumbnail, I'm going to put this hat on and John Ashley, just turn that into gold, will you? All right. He got the shot. We are to take a break. I made it black, so it's really easy to replace all the black.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Use a Photoshop credit on that. Make it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Putting it on Twitt's dime.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's on our dime. We have. Don't we have like a complete creative cloud subscription for you, John? No, we do.

[Jason Snell]

I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Spent a lot of money. I think we have multiple, like 6 or 7.7Full Creative Cloud licenses for the.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, it's going up in price. Might want to look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you feel about Affinity photo? We'll be back in just a moment. It's time for the picks of the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Jason Snell]

Bon voyage.

[Leo Laporte]

Introducing family freedom our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days.

[Jason Snell]

Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits.

[Leo Laporte]

With finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16 128GB 8299 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile ready to level up.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Alex Lindsay]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Jason Snell]

Download the Amazon Music app and get in on the joke or go to Amazon.com adfreecomedy that's Amazon.com ad free comedy to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's start our picks of the week with Jason Snell.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm going to harken back to an app that was Renee's pick about 400 episodes ago, hasn't been apparently mentioned since, and I mentioned it earlier here today. So in switching from Launch bar to Spotlight, one of the things that I miss is being able to insert an emoji by naming it, you know, command space and naming it and a great utility if you would like Slack style or Discord style, press colon and you can set it to something else. But that whole idea of like colon and Then the name of the emoji and it auto suggests. And then you hit return.

[Leo Laporte]

And the emoji animated gifts as well, though.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Yeah. So Rocket is the name of this. It's free. There's a $10 upgrade for all the pro features to unlock. It's been around, like, long enough for Renee to have recommended it in episode 500 and something. But, like, it's. It's very good. You can say what apps you don't want it to appear in, because sometimes you are typing colons and it gets in your way and you have to say, stop, Rocket. Don't do that. But. But it's a really great. I. I really like the way that Slack implemented the kind of like, type colon and then an emoji to insert it, rather than having to bring up the emoji picker and do a search and then click or whatever. And this does that. It just runs in the background.

[Leo Laporte]

Change the colon to some other character. The reason I ask is that is in common Lisp. That is the property. We'd be typing that every time.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I literally have that turned off in BB Edit for that reason. Because I'm typing stuff and it's like, would you like an emoji here? And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Yes. You can choose. You can choose the trigger key and you can choose a double key trigger if you want, where you have to double it. It's like double colon in order to get it out of your way. But. But. And. And then you can. You can zap the apps you don't want to ever see it in. And you can also, like, it's got a fuzzy search, so it makes it easier to find emoji even if you didn't quite get the name right. A lot of detail, like, as an app that's been out for a while, it's got a lot of preferences that you can. You can set, so you can get it out of your way, but it's there when you need it. And that. That is one of those things that I just. I used to use Launch bar. They poured that in there. At some point. I was like, great, this is how I'm going to use emoji. And I miss it. So Rocket is the answer.

[Leo Laporte]

I. That's good because I like in Obsidian, I like to put emojis everywhere, wherever I can.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So this is so you could set a double colon or some other. I mean, really, it's just a keystroke that you're otherwise not using back to tick or, you know, Whatever it is, and then you can double it. And at that point it's very unlikely to come up. And that's the whole point of it. So you just use it as a shortcut.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I just downloaded it and installed it as you were speaking. It's just that simple. The system works.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The system works.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things I've been playing with, I am, as you know, a big Perplexity user. And Perplexity has added the ability to. To add a MCP to it. And you can. The one I turned on lets it execute arbitrary applescript. So I can now ask Perplexity to do things like add an entry to Fantastical, and it will open Fantastical because it understands AppleScript well enough, I guess, to do that and add the entry. That is a very nice feature.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And you can use. You should be able now to use that Long Play app. That was my pick, maybe last week or two weeks ago. It has an MCP server, so you could also use. I was using it with Claude. But Perplexity will let you do it too, I think, because it's using MCP to say basically like, hey, have Long Play, find an album in my library that, you know, meets whatever criteria. And it will, you know, this is the great thing about MCP is it will let you do scripting, basically where the AI is able to ask your app for information and then tell it what to do. It's pretty.

[Leo Laporte]

So it Basically, the way it works, works is because the AI already speaks those languages, the MCP becomes a connector to other things. And the language, in this case, the one I use with AppleScript, and that's the one they use in the example, actually.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And then makes it possible to operate anything that uses the applescript.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's clever. And I mean, they're like. With Long Play, basically, there's like a little dictionary. It's very much like AppleScript. And MCP lets you just sort of say, here's what I can do. And then the agent, the AI bot, can say, oh, great. Well, then I know a lot of things about music and I also know what's in your library. And I can do a search and I can get a result, and then I can perform an action and add that to a collection or I can start playing it or whatever. I feel like this is definitely a future direction for lots of automation on devices because this is how you get, you know, to have your agent be able to control your computer and do stuff is a really exciting, fundamental future.

[Leo Laporte]

Phenomenal. Very, very exciting. Andy in Akko Pick of the week.

[Jason Snell]

Let our love be a flame, not an amber say it's me that you want to dismember Blacken my eyes, set fire to my tie as we dance to the masochism tango.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop it. You're. You're violating Tom Lair's copyrights. Andrew.

[Jason Snell]

No, because Tom Lair, who unfortunately we lost this week at age of 96. Not unexpected, but, oh, well, he actually released all of his songs in the public domain some years ago.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

And so you can get his entire catalog@tom layersongs.com T O M L E H R E R S o n g s.com either they have raw files of, like, each of his albums. They also have additional downloads for, like, if you want to mix some of the master tapes also wound up on top there. It's amazing. It's like he. And this was not something that he just said, oh, after I die. No. This is part of his amazingly interesting relationship to his career as a musician that when he went out, he just basically decided, I'm out. I'm not interested in this anymore. I'm just a math teacher and a music teacher. And in Santa Cruz and at Harvard and mit, he just like, sort of spontaneously, while talking to a friend, saying, oh, no, I'll. He wrote this paragraph by paragraph. I. In all forms and all ways. If you want to create new music for the lyrics, go ahead. If you want to create new lyrics for the music, go ahead. If you want to remix it, I. This is no longer my property. This belongs to everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Even so much.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. I mean, but BuzzFeed has. BuzzFeed wrote an amazing biography of him in 2014 that also, if you're interested in him that tries to go into, like, why he made these decisions that he did. I mean, he was so thorough that even the master tapes for his recording, they were just like, in a box in his basement. And I don't know whether it was a friend or fan or friend fan was just helping him, like, go through old boxes. And so if you'd like, I'd be happy to archive things and help you organize. Organize it. Said, oh, take it. Like, what do you mean, take it? No, the master tape. Take. Do whatever you want with them because they're yours.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. So it's.

[Jason Snell]

It's really quite amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

But the music is still super fantastic. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

We eulogized him on Sunday on Twit, and I played the Elements song, which I love, in which he said to the. I am the model of a modern major general sings every element. And we got taken down on YouTube and it's like, dudes, yeah, this is, this is not creative. This public domain.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why I hate content id. It doesn't care. And the trouble is that in order.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Some ass claimed it and, and now to defend myself, I'd have to do all this stuff. So we got demonetized on YouTube for TWiT. This is very.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is a. There is a whole scam industry where people upload content they don't own as the copyright owner and then shake people down to drop their claims.

[Jason Snell]

I will, I will have been like.

[Alex Lindsay]

With office hours, I decided specifically I'm not going to make any money on ads. And so I, I feel invincible because I just put stuff up whatever I want and I get these, these little flags and say, you're going to be demonetized.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. But demonetized advertising isn't the only option. That's the least draconian option. They can give you a strike if they want.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't gotten a strike yet. So. So I don't play the Eagles. So you're like, that's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, and the truth is this scammer, whoever, you know, took it, does want the money. So all they're going to do is they're going to, they're going to say, we're going to take that money that you'd earn on Twitter and we're going to put it in my pocket. Yeah, but there's no good defense to this. It's just a pain in the ass.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. That's why a lot of these, A lot of these laws that, that are in effect on basically giving, giving companies like Google and Facebook and Apple responsibility for taking down illegal content. The thing is like, they are going to create a system by which the law. The gravity of the, of the operations is going to be to favor taking things down, not favor making sure that they're not taking things down.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the take it down act easy.

[Jason Snell]

The safest, easiest and less least expensive things to simply say, if someone makes a complaint, it's gone. And will make it extremely difficult for the person to say, hey, wait a minute, this, this is actually someone who sampled one of my own YouTube videos and now they're copyrighting. Claim the original video.

[Leo Laporte]

So a little pro tip for those of you who hear Andy say it's public domain. It is public domain, but don't play it on your podcast.

[Alex Lindsay]

And on the other side of that on the other, I know, you know, obviously a lot of YouTubers and on the other side of that, you have people who are constantly taking YouTubers videos down and putting them back up as their own. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it happens to us all the.

[Alex Lindsay]

So there's this. So the other.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't do. We don't.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but the issue is, is that, that, you know, it's just a mess. It's very, very difficult to, to police. That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex, your pick of the week. I know you don't pick that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, no, I, I, So I, I keep my phone pretty carefully in a case with a screen protector and occasionally I drop my phone often enough where it's cracked it up that it's. That I have to go replace it. And I go through a lot of different screen protectors to figure out which one, but I've kind of settled down and this is the screen protector that I use for these. Now, the best one, the one that was the easiest one was when I. When you used to buy them and you go to Apple and Apple has some kind of crazy tool that they use to put them on. This is as close to that as you can get. And it's from Magic John. I don't know why it's Magic John.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Magic John.

[Alex Lindsay]

So many.

[Andy Ihnatko]

His son is good at basketball.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, John. Anyway, so, so this one. Here's the deal is this one's got an applicator that's not like you trying to figure out how to line it up. It is very, very clear. And when you open it up, it gives you a. And I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just on the top of my mind because I just bought one, I just bought this the other the other day for my. Mine and realized I was going to. It's got the little kit. It comes with two of them, so if you screw one up, you don't have to do it again. It comes with a little scraper thing that you need. And then it comes. Here's the best part. The best part of the whole thing comes with a QR code. And you take the QR code and it's a slightly funny but very effective video to tell you exactly how not. And how not to use, how to. And how not to put the. It'll do not. Put your fingers here. Put your fingers here. Do not. And it's a little Eastern European with like some pop music in the background. There's something about it that's very super cheesy. Cheesy and fun. But he's got like the big bracelets and everything else. Like there's something about it that's really, that's fun, you know. And, and, and it's gotten like a million views. So I imagine a bunch of us have bought this screen protector because just on YouTube, you know, like it's a link that just takes you to YouTube. But it's such a. I guess what I would say for people who make the products, everyone ha. There are. You go to Amazon and there are a thousand different companies that make screen protectors, you know, like that that's a. But what makes the difference with this one is the interface of how the taking the stress out of putting this. I've been putting screen protectors on my phone since pretty much the first one. And it's. For a long time it was like, oh, if you don't get it quite right, you got to peel it up again and now you're going to get something underneath it. And, and they figured out how to do that. And a lot of other companies have figured out but the applicator that makes it easy for you to put it on. And then the clear video is why I'm buying it because they're all 15 bucks. Like it's all 15 bucks for two of them. Like they're not are expensive.

[Jason Snell]

Like this is.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is a commoditized market. But what they. I think that companies always need to pay attention to the video support. The easiest way to make add value to your product is a video clearly showing how to use it well.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially with these. Because you can do a bad job of putting these on, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it just gets frustrating. It's stressful and it's like oh, you know at Apple they have a special tool, right. You go to the Apple store and they've got the Shung Shung tool that this is as close to the Shung Shun chunk tool as. As you get. You put it down and you pull this, this thing out that pulls. You know that oh, that's cool to cling to it and everything else. It's, it's a, it's like a real tool that you put. It's as close to the Apple tool that I've seen like sent to me and again it. And, and, and yeah that's why they call them.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean the only bummer is that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Every time I buy a new phone it's a different size. I buy another one. Cause I always have these the second one. Cause I've gotten so good at using it that I don't need the second one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but anyway, it's, it's. But it's the, it's the video and the applicator. There he is. He's a funny guy.

[Leo Laporte]

He looks magic.

[Jason Snell]

It has like a little.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope I don't get taken down by John for this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hopefully not.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope that's John. So.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but see that one, it's very clear. But, but the thing is when he, when he starts putting the applicator on, he's very clear. Like, do not put your fingers here. Put your fingers onto the side. Do not put your fingers here. Put your fingers to the side. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it's all. Thing. And what's funny is, is that immediately when I do it, I want to put my fingers where he told me, don't do that. I'm like, no, no, I can't do it that way.

[Leo Laporte]

And so John has become the kid.

[Alex Lindsay]

He's got the rings, the bracelets, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Spending that 15 bucks. Well, yeah, look at that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Anyway, I just. They only had to make the video once. And it. See, here's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

This is clever.

[Alex Lindsay]

See? And you pull that, you put that thing in. Remember, he sees a grab onto either side.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't press on it. Don't press the middle. Don't press your whole hand. No, no, no.

[Alex Lindsay]

You would do all things you would do otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

With two fingers.

[Alex Lindsay]

And, and, and then you're gonna, you're gonna pull that out and then.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that.

[Alex Lindsay]

And then it, there's a. Then you put your, you kind of run your finger. There you go. And it starts to seal. So it's gotta like a. I mean, I don't know what they had to do to figure that out, but there's a lot Clever.

[Leo Laporte]

And I can't believe you get it for so cheap.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is 15 bucks for two of them, you know, and it's, it's, it's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I never use a screen. Screen protector.

[Alex Lindsay]

You're crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Why should I?

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, okay, I've had mine almost, for almost a year. If I take the screen protector off and take it out of its case, it is in mint condition. Like if I ever wanted to trade it back or give it to somebody else or whatever I'm going to do with it. Well, I, I usually give them this one I'm going to keep because I've. My. Everybody's got what they need.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My family.

[Alex Lindsay]

So like they usually just go to my kids or my wife and so.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. No hand me downs this year. Kids.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, well, I gave my son the 14, which I use as my backup. I always have a backup camera so I can take pictures behind the scenes. Of me using the phone. Yes. I need one. One extra camera. And so anyway, so I'm. I'm short of camera right now, so I'll keep that one. But. But I just, you know, again, I've dropped too many. I mean, I don't know why I drop phones so often, but I'm using.

[Leo Laporte]

Them everywhere and, you know, I dropped magic john.com. don't go to magicjack.com. that's not the same.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's an entire. We know it's a good product, but not the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the same Magic John. J O. Don't go to Magic Jon dot com. I don't know what you'd get, but it's not the same Magic John. So you're saying I should get a screen. Does it feel different than the glass, though?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, it feels exactly the same to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Feels the same.

[Alex Lindsay]

It feels the same. It does the same. It's just as responsive. I have not had any. I don't feel anything different from the screen to the. To the screen.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no point buying it now because.

[Alex Lindsay]

When I crack it, I go, oh, right. I can just peel it off and put another one on. You know, like, it's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it cracks. Not the screen.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I've cracked it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a glass? So it's glass.

[Alex Lindsay]

Glass, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool. So I should wait until the iPhone 17 and then I should order it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Depends on how you. I mean, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, Magic John sells other things, too.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't. I'm not that excited about any of the other things that Magic John sells. Like, I looked at them. I looked at the website.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, the handheld fan with superconducting tech. How could you not?

[Alex Lindsay]

All the other stuff I. I looked at, I was like, I think they make most of their money on the screen protectors. I mean, like, looking at.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he start in the screen protector pizza?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think they did.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think they did.

[Alex Lindsay]

Screen protectors. Now they're trying to kind of like expand past this. I mean, it's a million. There's a million views on YouTube for just the iPhone 15 Pro. And they make lots of different ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I think that they're selling a.

[Jason Snell]

Couple of these screen protectors with a name like Magic John. I think he got to start selling pot. I'm just going to guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Or better. You're right. Now we are going get demonetized for showing that Thanks a lot, Andy. Alex, Lindsay, office hours global questions and answers every morning, particularly about media and production. He's the king of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

We're going to be getting ready for, I think next week we'll be doing some, we're hoping to do a lot another concert live stream like we did in the past. August 9th, I think we're hoping to do it. So we're trying to get all the cameras together, possibly some cool cameras to shoot it with. And so stay tuned for that and we'll show behind the scenes if we have them all in place.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Thank you. Alex. Andy Anatko, always a pleasure to see you in your beautiful air conditioned library.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I'm going to see if I can just hide under the table, turn off the lights and spend the night here because I'm not going back out in that. That's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Even without pants, it's really too hot. Thank you, Andrew. Appreciate it. And of course, Jason Snell, sixcolors. Com. Get ready. The colors emerge on Friday. Friday, that's right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Or Thursday.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe even Thursday. Maybe, even, maybe you'll get them done right away.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We'll have, we'll have some fun things to talk about, about whatever the heck it is that Apple is doing. We will find out cryptic things and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, is there something you'll be looking for, some like surprise that you'll be looking for or anything?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean I think everybody's still wondering about pricing and, and tariffs and how they view the future of that business given the tariff environment. I think that's still going to be be number one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. His podcasts [e-mail] Jason of course, all the great articles about 26 [e-mail] yeah, check it out. Thank you Jason. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you Alex. Thank you club members for joining us and keeping the lights on. Here at the Twit attic. We do Mac Break weekly as I mentioned, every Tuesday, 11am Pacific. I hope you'll watch live or download a copy of the show but I do hope you'll come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday, unfortunately, now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you you gotta get back to work because you know what, break time's over, baby. See you next week. 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 stage 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 choices yours. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts and head on over to our website, Twit TV for even more independent tech journalism.