MacBreak Weekly 984: Wessonality

Summary

MacBreak Weekly Episode 984: "Wessonality" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: August 6, 2025

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Andy Inatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell

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Introduction

In Episode 984 of MacBreak Weekly, titled "Wessonality," hosts Leo Laporte, Andy Inatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell delve into Apple’s unexpectedly strong Q3 2025 financial results. The discussion covers the factors behind Apple's performance, Tim Cook's strategic emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), groundbreaking accessibility technologies, and highlights from David Pogue's latest book celebrating Apple's first 50 years.

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1. Apple’s Strong Q3 2025 Performance

Overview of Financial Results: The episode opens with an analysis of Apple's Q3 2025 earnings, which surpassed expectations. Despite typically slower quarters outside of major product launches or the holiday season, Apple reported robust revenues across multiple categories.

Key Points:

• Revenue Breakdown:
  • Mac: Revenue surged by 15%, indicating strong sales of MacBook Air and Mac Mini models.
  • iPhone: Although iPhone revenue saw a slight decline, total sales increased by 13%, partially attributed to consumers purchasing ahead of impending tariffs.
  • Services: Continued growth with a 13% increase, bolstered by subscriptions and Apple’s expanding ecosystem.
  • Home and Wearables: Declines of 9% and 8% respectively, explained by “tough compares” to the previous year's launch of new iPad models.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell on Tariffs Impact: “[05:29] Andy Inatko: [...] people rushing to the store before the tariffs took place.”
• Alex Lindsay on Revenue Streams: “[05:44] Alex Lindsay: [...] iPad revenue down versus the year ago quarter because the year ago quarter, they introduced some new iPads.”

Discussion Highlights:

• Deferred Sales Impact: The hosts discuss how tariffs led to a temporary spike in sales as consumers preemptively bought products to avoid price hikes.
• China’s Contribution: A significant subsidy from the Chinese government revived iPhone sales in China, making the MacBook Air the top-selling laptop and the Mac Mini the number one desktop in the region.

Insights:

• Sustainable Growth: Alex Lindsay remarks on Apple's ability to maintain growth by shifting sales timelines rather than expanding into entirely new markets. “[08:09] Jason Snell: [...] Apple is really starting to win a cult, so to speak, inside of China.”
• Revenue Ratchet Effect: The episode touches on the concept that as Apple grows larger, it becomes capable of consistently generating $100 billion revenue quarters without relying on extraordinary sales events. “[07:14] Alex Lindsay: [...] we are on the precipice of Apple regularly throwing off $100 billion revenue quarters.”

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2. Tim Cook’s Strategic Emphasis on AI

Apple’s AI Strategy: Tim Cook emphasized the importance of AI during Apple’s recent all-hands meeting, signaling a strategic pivot to integrate AI deeply into Apple’s product ecosystem.

Key Points:

• Investment in AI: Apple is reallocating staff and increasing R&D expenditures to bolster its AI capabilities. “[25:36] Alex Lindsay: [...] Apple buys companies because they help Apple get where it wants to go.”
• AI as a Feature, Not a Standalone Product: Unlike competitors like Google, Apple views AI as an integrated feature enhancing existing products rather than developing standalone AI products.
• Acquisitions: Apple continues its tradition of acquiring companies that align with its roadmap, with Tim Cook asserting, “We are spending more in R and D. We're taking our current staff and reallocating them toward AI.”

Notable Quotes:

• Tim Cook on AI Integration: “[46:35] Leo Laporte: [...] Apple must do this. Apple will do this. We will feed them on the Beaches we will be. This is sort of ours to grab.”
• Jason Snell on Strategic Commitment: “[47:00] Jason Snell: [...] We are going to be a part of our portfolio of skills with AI. Not because it’s a trendy thing, but because the guy at the very, very top knows that this is the next wave.”

Discussion Highlights:

• Comparison with Competitors: The hosts compare Apple’s cautious, integrated approach to AI with Google’s more aggressive AI investments, suggesting that Apple’s strategy leverages its existing ecosystem effectively.
• Long-term Vision: Tim Cook’s remarks indicate that Apple aims to embed AI seamlessly into its device-centric model, ensuring that AI enhancements complement rather than replace core products.

Insights:

• Private Cloud Compute: Apple is investing in custom chips for private cloud compute, enhancing the performance and privacy of its AI services. “[30:16] Alex Lindsay: [...] custom chip for their future private cloud compute.”
• Focus on User Privacy: Apple’s AI developments are expected to prioritize user privacy, distinguishing its offerings from competitors who may leverage more data-intensive AI models.

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3. Innovating Accessibility: Mind-Controlled iPad

Groundbreaking Technology: A remarkable segment features a man with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) controlling his iPad using a brain-computer interface (BCI), showcasing Apple’s commitment to accessibility.

Key Points:

• Synchron’s BCI Chip: Developed by Synchron, this embedded chip allows seamless mind control of iPad functions without the need for touch, voice, or eye-tracking inputs.
• Integrated Switch Control: Apple’s switch control feature interfaces with the BCI decoder, providing contextual feedback to ensure smooth and accurate operation.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte on Accessibility Innovation: “[82:12] Leo Laporte: [...] uncovering how Apple built in the switch control feature, which is fantastic.”

Discussion Highlights:

• Non-Invasive Implantation: The BCI chip is implanted via blood vessels, reducing the invasiveness typically associated with such technologies.
• Future Applications: The technology extends beyond iPads, with planned support for iPhones and the Vision Pro headset, indicating a broad integration across Apple’s product line.

Insights:

• Enhancing User Independence: This innovation underscores Apple’s philosophy that accessibility features should empower users, providing them with greater independence and control over their devices.
• Potential Market Impact: Such advancements could lead to wider adoption of BCI technologies, setting Apple apart as a leader in inclusive tech design.

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4. David Pogue’s New Book: "Apple the First 50 Years"

Book Overview: David Pogue, a renowned tech journalist, has authored a comprehensive book titled "Apple the First 50 Years," celebrating the company's rich history and major milestones.

Key Points:

• Content Richness: The book spans 600 pages, featuring over 300 color photographs and 150 new interviews, offering an in-depth look at Apple’s evolution.
• Personal Insights: Pogue shares anecdotes from his extensive experience covering Apple, including personal interactions with key figures like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
• Accessible Narrative: The book is designed to be engaging for both tech enthusiasts and general readers, blending historical facts with compelling storytelling.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell on Pogue’s Expertise: “[102:32] Alex Lindsay: [...] David was always so. I was one of David's many editors at Macworld because he was a Macworld columnist before he was a New York Times columnist.”
• Alex Lindsay on Book’s Appeal: “[105:33] Jason Snell: [...] guarantee it will be a fun book to read because David doesn't write. Not fun.”

Discussion Highlights:

• Legacy and Continuity: The hosts reflect on how Pogue’s work preserves Apple’s legacy while providing fresh perspectives on its journey.
• Anticipation: There is widespread enthusiasm for the book, with hosts expressing eagerness to delve into its detailed chronicles of Apple’s history.

Insights:

• Educational Value: The book serves as both a historical document and an inspiring narrative, highlighting Apple’s innovations and cultural impact over five decades.
• Collector’s Item: Given the extensive interviews and photographs, the book is poised to become a treasured item for Apple aficionados and tech historians alike.

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5. Other Discussions

DOJ Antitrust Case Against Apple: The episode touches upon the ongoing Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust lawsuit targeting Apple's App Store policies and its financial agreements with Google.

Key Points:

• Potential Financial Impact: Apple faces a possible $20 billion annual payment to Google if the court rules against it, which could significantly affect services revenue. “[16:10] Leo Laporte: [...] if we lose all that Google revenue, which I don't think they've done that in a call before.”
• Business Strategy: Apple’s legal team emphasizes its hybrid strategy of maintaining robust product lines while cautiously expanding its services and AI investments.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Lindsay on Revenue Share Agreement: “[16:39] Alex Lindsay: [...] it's about losing the Google revenue, which is services revenue total.”

Discussion Highlights:

• Strategic Resilience: Despite legal challenges, Apple’s diverse revenue streams and strategic investments in AI are expected to mitigate potential losses.
• Judicial Uncertainty: The outcome of the DOJ case remains uncertain, with implications for Apple’s business model and relationships with major partners like Google.

Insights:

• Regulatory Environment: The discussion underscores the increasing scrutiny tech giants face regarding monopolistic practices and the balance between ecosystem control and fair competition.
• Future Outlook: Depending on the court’s decision, Apple may need to adapt its App Store policies and financial agreements, potentially reshaping its revenue distribution and market strategies.

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6. Closing Remarks

Innovations and Future Prospects: The podcast concludes with a forward-looking perspective on Apple’s continuous innovation, including upcoming Apple TV features, potential new product lines, and the integration of AI across its ecosystem.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell on Apple's Future Products: “[55:28] Alex Lindsay: [...] Apple is still on track to release a new Apple TV. What if Apple's Vision Pro list version of the best Vision Pro podcast we'll.”

Final Thoughts: The hosts express optimism about Apple’s trajectory, emphasizing the company’s ability to adapt and thrive through strategic investments and technological advancements.

Outreach and Engagement: Listeners are encouraged to support the show through various platforms, including the Club Twit membership, and to stay tuned for future episodes featuring in-depth analyses and exclusive content.

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Conclusion

Episode 984 of MacBreak Weekly offers a comprehensive analysis of Apple’s impressive Q3 2025 results, strategic focus on AI, groundbreaking accessibility technologies, and celebratory insights from David Pogue’s new book. The discussion highlights Apple’s resilience in the face of economic challenges, its methodical approach to AI integration, and its unwavering commitment to innovation and user empowerment. As Apple continues to evolve, the hosts provide insightful commentary on the company’s direction and its impact on the tech landscape.

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For more detailed discussions and live updates, tune into MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday at 11 AM Pacific / 2 PM Eastern.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Jason, Andy and Alex are all here. Coming up, of course, we're going to break down Apple's quarterly results. It was a surprisingly good quarter. Tim Cook explains why. We'll, we'll share that with you. We'll also talk about a man who is controlling his iPad with only his mind. And David Pogue's new book covers Apple the first 50 years. All that and more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Mac Break Weekly with Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. Episode 984 recorded Tuesday, August 5, 2025. Westonality. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show where we get together and talk about the latest news from Apple. It's going to be a colorful one this week. Alex Lindsay is here from officehours Global.

[Andy Inatko]

Hello. Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello, Alex. Andy Inako, Good to see you at the library.

[Jason Snell]

Good to be here. I'm in a good mood because when I was signing in to use the conference room, someone else was signing out at the same time. And I made a joking reference to those Warner Brothers cartoons where there's the wolf and the sheepdog are punching in at the sheep meadow. And I thought that I was halfway through it. I thought that I bet they don't get this. And they totally got the reference. And that has made my entire day. Morning, Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

Morning, Ralph.

[Andy Inatko]

That is serious.

[Jason Snell]

I'm so happy. Check it out. It's one of the funniest series that Chuck Jones ever did.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course, the man bringing the colors this week from sixcolors. Com, Mr. Jason Snell.

[Alex Lindsay]

Morning, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Morning, Jason. Did you who transcribed the analyst call last week?

[Alex Lindsay]

Audio Hijack transcribed it. So I open Audio hijack, which is a nice, just probably recommended here 90 times audio utility for the Mac. And it has a feature that they added a year or two ago that is a transcription block that is using basically it's using whisper from OpenAI, the open source transcription engine, and outputs everything it captures to a text file. So I leave that text file open and then I have another text file open that starts blank. And what happens is another audio hijack feature is you can, it's like a little DVR for whatever you're capturing, so you can pause it and back it up as you're listening. And so I, my process is basically I start the call with the first block of the transcript and I just keep copying what the transcript is giving me out, pasting it in, and then Playing and I just, I just watch as I'm listening to the call, I just watch what the transcript is and I fix it when I need to. And so, you know, it's not perfect. And that's why you do need a human involved who understands what all of these concepts are of financial reports. But I can get it. I used to have to type it myself. Right. Like 10 years ago, I typed it myself and now all I have to do is correct. When you get to the analyst questions and they mumble and whisper's like, I don't know what this guy is saying. And I'm like, I can do it, I can do it. I can probably figure it out. So as a human being who is used to mumblers anyway, so yeah, that's a huge improvement to use text, Speech to text in my workflow. Totally.

[Leo Laporte]

It used to be poor Serenity Caldwell had to type it in by.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, she and I, she and I used to tag team where, where we would like get in a shared Google Doc and I would, you know, we would listen to the first 10 minutes of the call and she'd be transcribed or like. And then she'd start transcribing it like minute 10. And I would go back to minute one and start there and we would basically just kind of like move through it separately in order to. You know, half the time, if you get to typists.

[Jason Snell]

Oh God, you're giving me, you're giving me flashbacks to sitting. You're giving me flashbacks to sitting at during like an Apple keynote and furiously having to type what's being said. Because I don't. Because it was the time when you just have to write something 10 minutes after it's finished.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. You have to quote that.

[Jason Snell]

The acronyms.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's. Yeah. I mean, again, this is one of the reasons that I am neither all whole, you know, wholly against nor wholly for AI is that I. Boy, AI tools are, can be, can be really good. You just gotta use them wisely.

[Jason Snell]

It's not. It's nice to be able as a, as a journalist. It's nice to be able to focus on the conversation and not focus on taking notes and being in the conversation. It's.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. For sure. Oh yeah. I mean, interview transcripts are also revolutionary that you used to have to be thinking on your feet. As Andy said, you're thinking on your feet while you're transcribing on with your hand, you know, holding a pen on paper and that's not enough when you're in a briefing.

[Andy Inatko]

And you have.

[Jason Snell]

You only. You only have 20 minutes for the briefing, and you have to ask the right questions, but you've written someone's. Then one of the engineers said something that is like three acronyms in a row. And now you've totally lost your mental place and you've forgotten the question you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Were about to ask, and everybody's just sitting there silently as you scribble. Not great.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's take a look. Thursday, Apple announced its Q3 results. Normally, as we said last week, kind of a mezzo, mezzo, mezzo, kind of a.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is one of those boring quarters, right, Leo? It's a boring quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Not this year. To which you can perhaps credit two things. One, the tariffs, because people rushed to the store before the tariffs took place. And. And actually, even maybe more significant, a subsidy from the Chinese government.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Which brought Chinese customers back to the iPhone.

[Alex Lindsay]

IPhone.

[Jason Snell]

That was interesting. They gave a lot of details there. It turns out that of the. What was a 13% increase in sales in Max. Or they basically attributed 1% of the increase in sales to people buying forward to get ahead of the tariffs.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. In the United States. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So iPhone quarterly revenue by category dropped a little bit. It used to be more than half. Now it's less than half. Because why? We had a big quarter for the Mac. Mac revenue up 15%. Of course, I found revenue up 13%. Services up 13%. Home and wearables down 9%. IPad revenue down 8%. Why were they down?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, Apple will tell you that the iPad revenue. I think this is fair. The iPad revenue is down versus the year ago quarter because the year ago quarter, they introduced some new iPads.

[Leo Laporte]

It had some nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

Including those iPad pros.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So that's always going to be tough, as they say. They call it a tough compare, which is a weird bit of jargon, but you get used to the weird bit of jargon. So, iPad down for that. Wearables, helmet, accessories. Funny story when you don't really think of it this way, but like, they attributed that to the iPad. Tough compare. And you're thinking, why? Why what? Huh? It's not the iPad category, but guess what? When people buy iPads, they buy keyboards and cases and Apple pencils and all.

[Leo Laporte]

Of that's in the other category.

[Alex Lindsay]

IPad. It's not in the iPad category. It's in this accessories part of wearable home and accessories. But, yeah, those two categories are down. Services continues to march up, but really good quarter for the Mac, some of which is definitely pulling ahead purchasers, because again, remember, Back to. To April and May, where people were convinced, like, with tariffs, the prices might go up any time. And it's a little like back in the pandemic where you had that moment where you think, well, I kind of need a new Mac or I kind of need a new iPhone, but I haven't felt the impetus to go do it. I know I'll buy one eventually. And then you get that. The tariff day that happens. And everybody says, oh, maybe now. Maybe I should just go ahead and do it now. Which is great. But you're, you know, theoret, basically, you're pulling sales that might have been spread over the next year into a single quarter. And Cook and Kevin Parrack, the cfo, definitely said that some portion of their iPhone and Mac sales in the US Was lifted by that.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, and there was a lot of good news in China, too. I just. It was. They called out a couple of very interesting bits about how MacBook Air is the number one selling laptop in China. Mac Mini, number one desktop in China. Given that there's been a lot of bad news coming out from China, that was all really, really good news, including the. With the iPhone. And that was reflected with. I think we talked about this a month or two ago. The government offered a consumer product program where people would get money back for purchasing certain types of electronics. Apple, for some reason, was hanging back for the first part of that, but then they jumped back in and clearly that was the right move.

[Alex Lindsay]

There was. There was a price cap, I think, is what it was, and they lowered the price of certain models to get under the price cap, which allowed the Chinese reimbursement thing to happen and then dramatically reduce the cost of. Of get certain iPhone models. And that seemed to be very successful. Yeah, it is a. An interesting combination of things. And, and Leo, I mean, to your point, I think you called it right, which is. This is one of those quarters that we consider kind of in the doldrums, and it's just kind of like we're waiting for. There were no major announcements, and it's not the holiday quarter. And when, when these announcements came out, Dan Moran, who works with me on Six Colors, we did a little live YouTube stream afterward to just kind of talk through the charts. And he made, I thought, a really great observation, which is, when you can have a routine, boring quarter, generate $94 billion in revenue. We are on the precipice of Apple regularly throwing off $100 billion revenue quarters that are dull, not uninteresting quarters, which is wild. But when you think about it when they're this big. I mean the way I described it in a piece I wrote last week is like, it's like a ratchet. It's like when they're this big, it just kind of keeps ratcheting up. Andy mentioning the MacBook Air in China, like that's actually a great example where there are always way more iPhone users than there are Mac users. Right, we know that. But like every. What's the up side for the Mac in China? It's like almost nobody has one. Even though they have a market share. Almost nobody has one. But all these people have iPhones. Every single one of those people is a potential new to Mac customer. And they said they got a lot of new to Mac customers. They said they. And then this is worldwide. If you think about the iPhone and the Apple watches, an iPhone accessory, there's so many more iPhones out there than there are Apple watches that even though we think of the Apple watch as this 10 year old product, that's just sort of like it's around and it's fine. But like from Apple's perspective, every one of those iPhone users is a potential Apple watch buyer. And they said half of the Apple watch purchases last quarter were from people who had never bought an Apple Watch before. So that kind of like just creeping oozing, kind of like you know you have one and eventually you'll buy another or maybe a third Apple product. That is how you get to 100 billion a quarter in a boring quarter.

[Andy Inatko]

And also I think that, that the, the, the Mac Mini is such a incredible trojan horse for Apple in the sense that I mean it was a cute before the M series, it was a cute computer, you know, and you could do little things with it. But you know, I was over the weekend I was working on a project and you know, we needed a little bit more horsepower. I just grabbed the Mac M4 Mac mini and threw it in my backpack and you know, I had a hundred dollar screen that I connected it to with a cheap keyboard on a foldable table. And I was doing a lot of work with it. And it's a really for most people's use, a little 600 Mac mini is way more than they need. Especially if they've already got some, their PC monitors around and other things like that. It's not much for them to switch over. So I think it's a great switchover computer.

[Jason Snell]

Can I say something honest that I'm evaluating? It's end of 20, 25, beginning of 20, I'm going to have to update my MacBook. I'm going to have to update my Mac Mini. And I'm actually thinking about offsetting it and saying, well, what if I get a Mac Mini and if I need it in a mobile situation again, like coming here to podcast, I'll just use my iPad as an external display and basically make that my mobile powerhouse rather than. Because it's easier to go with like $800 to a nicely, nicely kitted out Mac Mini before I spent $2,000 on a MacBook with Pro with the stuff that I needed to do. And at $2,000, I don't think chronological is amazing.

[Andy Inatko]

I don't think that at $2,000 it's as useful a laptop is as useful as the. I carry a laptop around.

[Jason Snell]

For me it is, I need to know.

[Andy Inatko]

For you, it is like, for me, I like, I carry the laptop around. But it's, you know, to me, I don't, I'm not willing to invest in a laptop at this point. I either need way more power or way less power. And you look at it, I mean, even like I have all these little M1s, you can go out and buy these for an M2 Mac mini for $385, you know, and it's gonna, it's gonna, you know, I have little M1s just stacked up here that do all kinds of work for me and they're remarkably fast. And so I think that, that it's such a great market for Apple since the M series. Before the M series, it was like glue. You know, you do little things with it. But since the M series came out, it's, it's been really a magical little device.

[Jason Snell]

But getting back to what, what Jason was saying, one of the very, very positive and remarkable things is that the retention is not the growth of the market. And the retention is also happening worldwide. SERP had a report, I think it was released just this week. Talking about, we might talk about the actual report later on today. But amongst the things that are, since we're in earnings call speak tailwinds for Apple is the fact that there seems to be a trend in consumers to go for the premium stuff now. And Apple's benefiting from it. And the data is showing that when despite all the competition in China from having essentially a national phone brand, Huawei that's making some amazing phones, me that's also making some amazing phones, not only are they growing iPhones, but people are replacing their old iPhones with new iPhones and with new Apple accessories. So Apple is really starting to win, win a cult, so to speak, inside of China, which was a year or two ago. We might have thought that maybe Apple is not going to be a good place in three or four years there.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe if they had better AI story they'd make as much money as Microsoft did in the quarter. But oh well, you know, Microsoft actually became a $4 trillion business after its quarterly results. Same day they made a little more money to $24 billion. But 23 billion in 12 weeks ain't anything to sneeze at.

[Alex Lindsay]

Obviously it's okay. I mean it's fine. They did fine. Also their margin was 40, 0.5% total margin, which is bananas. And they, I think that I, I wanted to throw in last year during this quarter where they had kind of like a fairly low product quarter and, and services kept on chugging along. I realized, and we talked about it a year ago that one of these days there's going to be a quarter where Apple makes more profit on its services than it does on its products. Which you know can be overstated. Right, because the services revenue firmly comes from people who bought their products. It's not freestanding, it's, it's built on primarily the iPhone. But that said, this quarter they didn't quite get there, but they got really close because again you've got the product margins which are not bad, but then the, the services margins are like in the 90%, they're pure profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there was a caution from the cfo, Kevin Parik Parikh. How do you say that?

[Alex Lindsay]

I said parak.

[Leo Laporte]

Parak. I don't know, Kevin, who said. As we move into the September quarter, I'd like to review our outlook which includes types of forward looking information. The color we're providing assumes that global tariff rates, policies and applications remain in effect as of this call.

[Alex Lindsay]

Indeed. And the next morning they were different.

[Leo Laporte]

And they did at the time during the call say about $800 million loss to tariffs this quarter. But it's going to be much more next quarter. But they also point out the current revenue share agreement with Google is in jeopardy. This month's we expect the judge, Judge Alsop to announce what he's going to tell Google to do. Among other things, it could be cut off that $20 billion a year payment to Apple and that goes right to services.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, that was something that they have not really mentioned that before.

[Leo Laporte]

Judge Meta. No, I'm sorry.

[Alex Lindsay]

And you know they're listing the usual threats like the tariffs and the macroeconomic conditions globally and then they're like, oh yeah. And also if we lose all that Google revenue, which I don't think they've done that in a call before. And like it's a, it's a. Because that's all services revenue and that's services revenue total. I overshot earlier. It's about 75% last quarter. But you know, the Google stuff is, I don't know how they account for it. It's probably not 100% profit. They probably put some degree of Safari engineering against it and claim that it's, you know, paying for Safari or something like that. But I think we could all agree that it's probably like a 95% margin amount of money.

[Leo Laporte]

20 billion would be about 20% of the total. So it's, that's a 20% drop potentially. I'm not sure if Judge Mehta will do that to be.

[Andy Inatko]

Well and also it depends on whether they, they can, whether they're going to continue to operate in an appeal, you know, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's right. Because.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. And if they have a, and if they have a backup plan. But you know, this, the, the great mystery of that case is it's, you know, everybody keeps circling around the idea that most of the punishment for Google would not harm go, but would harm everybody who Google is paying money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Mozilla, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

It would harm Mozilla, it would harm Apple, it would harm everybody that Google would just walk away not being able to write checks for $20 billion a year. What a punishment that would be for them. Also, it's unclear like it may, it may be that they end up in a browser choice situation where they can't be the default and they have to be chosen by people, but that they're still allowed to pay for the ones who use. Who knows how they're going to, going to do it. But it's an appreciable issue for Apple. In fact, I think a bigger risk for them than tariffs because Apple seems to have a few different ways to deal with tariffs.

[Andy Inatko]

And I think that, I think if they're able to continue to pay, if people are using their product, the impact to Apple will be much lower. Because I mean Google is so far ahead. If you're using a search engine other than Google, you're decided you wanted to play on gravel. Like you know, like, like, you know, like it's like there's not that it's not close. Like everyone, I go up every once in a while and try other ones out and I'm just like, okay, like I'm gonna go back to the normal one because it's, it is so dominant it not in just the market size but in the quality of the result that I just don't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

You sound like you're coming to us from three years ago.

[Andy Inatko]

I completely, I don't know I mean I don't that when I go what.

[Leo Laporte]

I will say that's not true at all.

[Andy Inatko]

Alex. Google 80% of my users chat.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Try cocky. Try DuckDuckGo. Try something.

[Andy Inatko]

I tried DuckDuckGo last week and I was like I'm never gonna use this again.

[Jason Snell]

This is trash for me. The other search engines are good for if you want more if you want different types of results but I never get results as good and as focused to what I'm looking for, what my interests are than I do with Google. And also the thing is as, as much as they as analysts are predicting problems with AI based search from competitors they're still, I mean Google search believe it or not is still growing like 10 to 12% a quarter. So people it's, it's hard to beat the.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Google pays $20 billion a year to Apple so that they continue to make that the default.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean if you gave people the option of Kagi would they swould they if they gave. If you gave them a clean choice mean the default engine is not set you at this point in the installation you are going to pick the default search engine. How many people are going to pick?

[Andy Inatko]

They probably don't know how to given that they probably don't know how to go back and change it later. Like if you showed it to me I'm like I don't even know where to find that. So I'm just going to hit Google like I'm just going to like I'm not going to try to figure and the reason I have such a strong opinion is that I saw an ad for DuckDuckGo and said oh I haven't tried DuckDuckGo and I decided for the whole afternoon I'm going to use DuckDuckGo for searching. And by the end I was like never again see this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like to what Leo said that sounds exactly how I felt a year or two ago but I don't feel that way now. And I think that part of it is that is that Google I mean I do use Cocky now people aren't going to use cock because you have to pay for it and, and you know, so that's fair. And the argument is not what Are people going to choose? The argue is, are there better choices? The argument is there, and I would say that your mileage may vary. And there are certainly certain things where I go back to Google search because I know that Google has a better comprehensive product. But I will say this as somebody who's used Google since day one as my primary, that the introduction of AI summaries at the top of Google searches has so poisoned my relationship with Google that I don't use it for search anymore because the top half of it is garbage that is lies and is wrong and is completely false, and I don't want to waste my time on it anymore. And that I think that's Google so headlong rushing into AI because it sees it as its future, perhaps correctly, that it's destroying its product in the present.

[Andy Inatko]

And I admit that, like, if I'm looking for information now, I just go to ChatGPT. If I'm looking for a specific thing, if I look for a specific thing, I am, I am then going to. For a thing, I go to Google. So I don't like if I'm looking for general information because it has links. I mean, I asked ChatGPT, it could be a bunch of things, and then it gives me links and I can go refer back to whatever, like, did it really get this right? Or where is it coming from? And so on and so forth. And I, I don't know. I don't find that ChatGPT is less accurate than most of those stuff written on the Internet. I mean, I look at the stuff, you know, when people write articles about anything, I know I'm always like, okay, that's cute. So just old school.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand. It's okay. We'll, we'll, we'll see you in the future again.

[Andy Inatko]

Again. I would say 80% of my time now that would have gone to a Google search is now chat GPT. So it's a small, it's, it's also a much smaller part of my.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you. That's perhaps a shift.

[Jason Snell]

Me too. When I need to know is the title of a Broadway musical italicized or in quotes? I go to Gemini. I don't necessarily. Because I'll get question answer.

[Andy Inatko]

I don't want to really.

[Leo Laporte]

Just the fact that people can question Google's hegemony is a big shift.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, they know it.

[Leo Laporte]

Five years ago we would all be in agreement here.

[Andy Inatko]

I mean, the challenge with searching now is that you go, okay, I want to see the top 10 printers or the top 10 whatever. And if I Do a search. I'm going to get ad laden garbage from every website that I go to. That's a top 10 list of that stuff. Unless I go to Consumer Reports or six colors, you know, like I'm going.

[Alex Lindsay]

To get bar cutter. Yeah. Basically you have to not trust the search there.

[Andy Inatko]

Can't trust the search at all. Exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because it's all been game changer.

[Andy Inatko]

But I asked ChatGPT and it just gives me a bunch of them and I go research them and I'm like, oh, that looks great.

[Leo Laporte]

We're actually going to have the CEO, the founder of Kagi on intelligent machines tomorrow.

[Alex Lindsay]

So if you're interested, Alex, you made a really great point there. Which is one of the areas where the chatbots are actually better than Google is that the, all the SEO garbage on the Internet targets Google. It's meant to game Google and as a result Google is fooled by it because as much as they try, they're trying to fool Google. And the chat bots I think generally are better at saying what are the reliable sources here? Let's, let's link to those. And so you find often and that for me that's, it's all about finding reliable sources and not junk. And the chat bots, because they're not the ones yet being as gamed as Google is by SEO people on the Internet, the results end up being better there. But that's, that's, you know, Google being a victim of its own success essentially.

[Leo Laporte]

People search differently too. It isn't so much that you're looking for the link. The link. Right. Which is what Google was very good at. Now you're looking for different kinds of.

[Andy Inatko]

Things and I'm having a conversation like I was trying to find a POE router, a POE switch that is powered by battery. And I'm sitting there like what are the issues and what can I, what are the options? And I'm sitting there going back and forth with ChatGPT. I don't know, in 15 minutes I figured out what I needed and it would have taken me, you know, half a day. Just try to search through and read articles about, to try to figure out.

[Leo Laporte]

The same thing back to Apple's results. Anything else, Jason, that kind of stuck out to you as being of interest?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I mean we've, we've covered the, the big stuff. It's a, I mean the fact that it's so huge. The fact that they, that, that, I mean let's, let's go, let's talk about AI just in the sense of mergers and Acquisitions, because that was the thing that kept on coming up.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you going to buy, Are you going to buy Perplexity?

[Alex Lindsay]

So he said, he said, look where they're increasing their investment. They did so current quarter, doing so next quarter. Reallocating people on staff, trying to send the message that we're on it. We are spending more in R and D. We're taking our current staff and reallocating them toward AI. We do believe in it. There was a meeting, which we'll probably get to in a little bit, an all staff meeting, basically where Tim Cook really did, evangelizing the importance of AI to the company. And then, you know, again, these analysts are just like, but really buying anything. And Tim Cook sounded almost offended because he's like, look, we, we buy a company every few weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

We've already acquired around seven companies this year. And that's companies from all walks of life, not all AI oriented. So we're doing one.

[Alex Lindsay]

Think of it as one every several weeks. We're busy. I'm working here. Right. Like we're on it. But he does say it could be big, it could be small. But this is, I think the key insight here, which, which is, is not new. It is the way Apple approaches this. And so sometimes you get people from the outside who are like, oh, Apple doesn't know what it's going to do with AI, so it'll buy an AI company and figure it out. And that is not what he said. And that has never been Apple's approach, which is, as he put it, we ask ourselves whether a company can help us accelerate a roadmap, which again, I got to roll my eyes back into my head about the, the mixed metaphor of accelerating is that you throw a roadmap over the, across the room or something. But, but this is the point is Apple buys companies because they help Apple get where it wants to go, not because Apple doesn't know where to go. And so what he's really saying here is we have a strategy, we have a lot of thoughts about what we want to do in AI and if there are companies that we could buy that will help us get there, we will buy them. And, and like, and we can. And they don't have to be big, they don't have to be small, we can do whatever we want. And you know, I think this is the most he will ever say. But, but he's not saying they're not interested in investing in AI or potentially buying companies that help them get where they need to go. You know, I, I don't I don't think this is a statement that they're about to buy a bunch of AI companies, but it would not surprise me at all. It does feel like he's saying we, we may very well be doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Ben Thompson's analysis in he says, to be clear, that's a pretty bog standard Apple answer. But I think it's notable that Cook sees no need to change that answer. Apple buys companies to tuck into its roadmap. It doesn't change the entire map and there was certainly no signal the company plans on changing that approach.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean this is, this is how Apple plays its game. And, and, and like when we can disagree with it, right. You could say Apple doesn't, doesn't get it, but I think Apple does get it, but is trying to get it in their own particular way and their own particular. Which, you know, as Ben goes into in that piece, Apple has some advantages in that it's AI is not necessarily a threat to its core business. And in fact the fact that it makes, as we've talked about here, makes phones and that AI stuff runs on phones and that Apple can continue to have a device business, that they've got a little more room to maybe approach this from a different direction than Meta or Google doesn't, doesn't absolve them. Right. There's still lots of hard issues out there, but that they, they seem to be having a strategy that is what we would expect Apple to have for something like this.

[Jason Snell]

And the strategy is still sell more iPhones, sell more iPads, sell more Macs. It was, I thought it was kind of interesting that in Tim's prepared comments, it was practically a WWDC, like first 10 minutes of the keynote. It was, hey, here's what we're doing with with iPad OS. IPadOS is going to make the iPad a lot more productive and a lot more useful. Hey, here's what we got. This new liquid glass. It was like, as I'm sort of listening to it live, like just sentence by sentence, I'm wondering to myself what analyst is thinking, oh, thank God they've got a new version of the OS coming out this year. But when you think about it, just as in total, he's basically making the case that here is the strategy that has made us into a $3 trillion company that has given us this kind of growth. We are not going to simply say, well now we're in the of making salad dressing because lots of other companies are making salad dressing now. This is our core business. We know what we're doing and we've got a good roadmap and we're sticking to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually Thompson makes the point, talking about Capex capital expenditures that Apple is extraordinarily conservative. They're doing about $4 billion a year which is a fraction of what for instance Google is doing.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they're not buying enormous amounts of GPUs, they're instead talking about making investments in private cloud compute. And we know that they're based on Mark Gurman's reports that they're talking about doing a custom chip for their future private cloud compute that's still based on Apple silicon but it's a different kind of profile right now they're stuffing like M2 pros or whatever into their, into their cloud infrastructure. But they're like the investments they're making are very Apple Y investments and that seems to be again, it's not a guarantee of it being the right strategy, but it is very much them doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Their thing, being careful, being somewhat conservative. They historically have spent less on research and development than anybody else.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, and it's interesting, I don't know if I saw this on one of Jason's charts or somebody else's, but their increase in spending on R and D is actually outstripping their increase in spending on capital expenditures. And they got one direct question I think during the Q and A about it and Tim pretty much reiterated what I was saying before that. A, yes, you can expect us to accelerate our capital expenditures as we continue to have to build out more compute for our, for our Apple intelligence private compute sector. But he was very, very strong to strict to remind people that we have a hybrid strategy that we are not going to simply if we need more compute, that's not the special Apple private compute. We can just, we're just going to continue to buy it from Google. Let them like buy the land, let them ruin the environment. We'll just like write the checks and not have to basically take on all this extra debt. So yeah, it's not like Google's calls where every single quarter it's like how much did you spend on capital expenditures this time and how much more are you spending than you promised you told us you were going to be spending last quarter?

[Andy Inatko]

I think also Apple's not as shotgun related so a lot of other people have a lot of R and D but they're experimenting with so many different things all at one time and most of them are failing. Apple tends to pick a handful of things and so I think it's a much more focused approach. I think Apple might be able to make more money if they were doing more things, but they could also become kind of a Fujitsu.

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen Google's Pixel 10 ad, but the Pixel 10 is coming out later this week. This ad basically casts. I'll turn on the audio. I guess I can do that. It's an ad, right?

[Jason Snell]

It's Google.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not going to take me down, are they? I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

You can upload photos, so this is.

[Leo Laporte]

A 30 second ad to show you how AI want.

[Alex Lindsay]

So you could upload a picture of.

[Jason Snell]

A table and say, can you.

[Andy Inatko]

I don't know what I'm doing.

[Jason Snell]

Hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

There we go.

[Jason Snell]

It was just a voiceover.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there we go. Here we go. This is Google's Pixel 10 ad, which isn't playing now.

[Andy Inatko]

If you buy a new phone because.

[Jason Snell]

Of a feature that's coming soon, but.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S been coming soon for a full.

[Andy Inatko]

Year, Apple, you could change your definition.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of soon or you could just change your phone.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That is, that is kind of gutsy from a company that is famous for announcing and killing things.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. It all comes. It'll come back to you again. Just like it did for Samsung. It'll all come back to you again.

[Jason Snell]

Gutsy. Gutsy but weird. I mean, they, they, they have to go after Apple because they can't go after Samsung because they're, they're their partners.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And, and this is the sort of claim that you can only make like this is the last year, which you can say anything like that because what's the saying that if it's good, people will always remember. If the thing you ship was terrible, they will forget. If it's good, they'll forget that the thing was late. As soon as Apple delivers really good phone based AI services, the fact that the Pixel phones had them like five years earlier almost becomes irrelevant. And it's rather optimistic to think that any iPhone user is going to think, oh gosh, I'm sick and tired of waiting another six months for a voice assistant that works great. I'm going to switch all of my apps and all of my accessories and all of my platforms to something that I haven't used ever.

[Andy Inatko]

And especially when again, for an Apple user, it is effortless. It is. I literally hold down a button and say, janet. And I immediately have ChatGPT and I ask it whatever I want. It doesn't, I mean, it's. I don't, I guess I just don't. I don't feel the any pressure for Apple to go any further with it.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I did buy another phone, but I wish it were an iPhone. This is a Samsung phone. I was the new fold. I was very interested in, you know, what this form factor is going to look like next year when Apple does something similar. And I love the form factor. I love it that I can open it up and get, you know, an iPad size screen out of it and all that. But I don't love it that it's just a dry well.

[Andy Inatko]

The problem for me is that I there was somebody that had just bought one where I was working and he showed it to me and I opened it up and the first thing I did is I put my finger across that center, that centerpiece.

[Leo Laporte]

I can still feel it. I didn't say it. It's better than it was. I mean it's gonna. Well, what if Apple has that? Because they're gonna.

[Andy Inatko]

I won'. Next year, no interest in the.

[Alex Lindsay]

I expect Apple's will be one year better than that, right. Next year still going to be a Samsung display and, and then I mean I look the Apple folding phone is going to be self sorting. Like some people are going to love it and other people are going to go, nope, and guess what, there are many other iPhones for you to buy.

[Leo Laporte]

I couldn't help but think though, if this were an iPhone, I would because you've got a full size basically phone on the front and not any thicker than a regular phone. And then you have this opportunity and.

[Andy Inatko]

I will say the person that showed it to me just loved it. Like just loved it.

[Leo Laporte]

The people who love it will love it, right? And I would love it more. I'm just not. The Samsung Cruft is hard to get used to and I think it'll be nice when it's an iPhone, let's put it that way. All right, let's take a little break, come back. We have much more to talk about. Those were the results. A good quarter for Apple I think.

[Jason Snell]

Three also three billionth iPhone sold.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, oh yeah. Total all time out.

[Alex Lindsay]

After years they picked that one off the line. But that's a, you know, if you look at how many years it took to get to 1 billion and 2 billion and 3 billion, you can see the kind of shocking growth in iPhone.

[Jason Snell]

2% of the market. Steve Jobs have to be very, very happy with that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's only 2%. It's about 80% of the profit. It.

[Jason Snell]

No, I'm sorry, no. I remember when, when the, when the iPhone Was. Was first announced. We'll be happy to get 2% of the market. Like, yeah, you gotta eat a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

It's almost 50 in the United States, but it's probably not more than 20 or 30% of the market globally. Right. I don't know what it is.

[Jason Snell]

I don't know. I think it's high teens. I think teens.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And that goes to what I was saying about growth opportunity for Apple. Right? Like, like they're not. They don't have a lot of markets where there's no potential for them to.

[Leo Laporte]

Sell more product except that they refuse to do a cheap one. And that's what the bulk of.

[Jason Snell]

And that's. Yeah, I mean that was, that was another thing about that, about one of those reports where the report was not just about like sales but also revenue. And yeah, Apple is behind Samsung and Samsung in actual unit shift. But I think if I'm remembering correctly, they are at the very, very top of the thing. 42, 43% revenue versus like 812 to 14 from Samsung. Yeah, it's like a profit. And, and yeah, that's.

[Andy Inatko]

And I think the issue is, is that they don't sell very well. Like they, they've made ones that are cheaper and you look at the sales and the sales on the, on the expensive ones are doing just way better. I mean, it's more volume and more margin. Like, why would you do the smaller ones?

[Jason Snell]

We might, we might be getting ahead of ourselves. But there was another report about the 16E, another research group that had access to the first full quarter that they were tracking iPhone sales. They're saying the 16e is doing exceptionally well where it sells much, much better than the iPhone SE in a comparable market that is being. People are choosing them instead of legacy phones that are in the line. They were saying specifically that it's doing gangbusters in Japan for some reason. So I agree that I don't think there's a place for Apple to make a $300 phone or a good 200 dol. 300 phone. Samsung and Motorola can make exceptionally good 200 and 300 phones. But that's not why people want an Apple iPhone. They want something that has that, that has that Western ality. You know that, that, that, that, that meatiness, you know that savoriness when you hold it and you use it.

[Leo Laporte]

So is that what they call that Western ality? We're gonna take a break.

[Jason Snell]

Florence Anderson, you're still alive in our hearts.

[Leo Laporte]

Western Al. That's Andy Inako with a callback to the good old days of television advertising. He is always fun with that kind of retro stuff. Just ask him how many classic imacs he has. Macintoshes, how many do you still have? He said you had dozens.

[Jason Snell]

I had dozens. Now I felt as though like I'm spending too much money to store them. So I kept like, maybe the six best, that's all you need, and gave the rest away.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you need. Six Mac Classics, that's all you need. Jason Snell's here. He's got one. And a load runner. Everybody's saying, what's that in the background on his Iici? It's a load runner.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Apple IIC running off of a USB C cable through an adapter, which is hilarious. And a VGA and HDMI output. And it's running Championship Load Runner booted off of an SD card on floppy, using floppy EMU.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that one of the first color Apple IIs?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, the IIE actually the two plus supported color through composite I. It's just the challenge these days is getting old computers to do something other than composite because analog TVs are gone, but there are lots of adapters to do hdmi. Or in this case, that's a VGA flat panel that's running behind me. I just like to prove occasionally that all the computers behind me do work. They all do work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. You might take some work to get them to work, but they work.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Even there's one up there that you haven't noticed yet that we'll talk about later.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now everybody's going to be looking carefully. Also, Alex Lindsey from Officehours globally on 090 Media, our show this week brought to you by 1Password. 1Password. Over half of IT pros in a survey say that job one, their biggest challenge is securing SaaS apps. Isn't that interesting? You know, with the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it, I guess it's not hard to see why. But there is a solution. It's part of 1Password's extended access management. It's called Trelica. Trelica by 1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, whether they're managed or not, whether they're approved or not. Trelica by 1Password inventories every single app in use at your company. Then pre populated app profiles it knows about every single one of them. Assess the SaaS risk telling you manage access, optimize, spend and enforce security best practices across every single app your employees use. Even the shadow IT apps they don't want you to know about. It also lets you securely onboard and offboard employees and meet compliance goals. It's very cool solution. Trelica T R E L I C A BY1 password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of many ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. Of course we all know 1Password's award winning password manager. Trusted by millions of users in over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. But now they're doing more than just securing passwords with 1Password's Extended Access Management. I want you to check it out. It is a way to protect your company against those SaaS apps. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn more at 1Password MacBreak that's 1Password.com MacBreak all lowercase. We thank you so much for your support of Mac. Break weekly. 1Password.com MacBreak all right, enough of the. Enough of the earnings. Let's see what else is going on. We've got lots.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can we segue into Tim's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So he hasn't. When is the last time they did an all hands at Apple? It's been a couple of years, I think.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

But it's a while like they actually literally got people into I think the Steve Jobs theater.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I think they're nervous about leaks because in past. Yeah, that's been a big problem. Of course, immediately.

[Alex Lindsay]

You might, you might though use it as a way to leak a message about how seriously you take AI.

[Leo Laporte]

So he. This is. Is when he says all hands. It was everybody. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think all employees were supposed to like either be there or tune in. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Watch it. Wow. What did he say? How long was it? What are the leaks?

[Alex Lindsay]

Say, I will start with a tidbit that I got which is that that 3 billionth iPhone, they intercepted it off the line and he had it at the event and said what should we do with it?

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty funny.

[Alex Lindsay]

It belongs in a museum. Okay. That's how that works. But. But then, you know, he pumped him up about AI. Right. Which he should do too.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the. Was that. The point was to be. Be reassured. We're working on it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And Tim, there are a lot of. I agree with Jason that it's not as though they wanted this as a press release for everybody, but they knew that certain quotes would make it out. And so like Tim was saying that, hey look, we've, we've rarely been first. Like we weren't first with the desktop computer, we weren't first with the phone, we weren't first with the iPad. But we think we did the best, we've transformed it. We think we're going to do the same thing with AI. FrederickI was talking about Shlomo and saying that we are start to finish, top to bottom rewrite. It's exceeding our expectations.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. Which is new. Right. Because at WWDC they weren't going to over promise and under deliver but in a thing heard, you know, through sources from an event where the whole damn thing. Right, but, but he. So that's a good venue to say, oh, not only, you know, are we going to ship what we did, but, but it's, it's working and better than we thought. Which is not something that we've heard before. That's how you get that stuff out there. Plus it serves, I think a super important purpose which is to try to evangelize to the people who are working at Apple. One, yes, AI is important. Two, you should be using it because you know, this is one of those things I know people are like, who don't like AI are creeped out by that. But it's like to understand what AI is good and bad at, you need to actually use it. And so he's saying, yes, you need to use this. We're not trying to put our head in the sand. You need to be using this stuff every day, understanding what it's good for. And then also I think he's sending the message to people who might be wavering about like, do I want to be at Apple working on AI stuff to say, no, we do take it seriously. This is a company commitment. So I mean it's exactly what you would expect him to do to kind of whip up the troops and say, I'm not kidding here, this is super important. This is how you change or at least direct corporate culture is with stuff like this. And knowing that that message is going to get out, out via Mark Gurman and others to the rest of the world.

[Leo Laporte]

It felt like almost reassurance. Right. He says, according to Gurman, the AI revolution is as big or bigger as the Internet. Smartphones and cloud computing are apps.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is the pull quote. Apple must do this. Apple will do this. We will feed them on the Beaches we will be. This is sort of ours to grab.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. That's a great pep talk though, right? Because he's not, he's not saying reassurance. He's saying if you think that AI is going to blow over and we don't need to worry about it, you're wrong. It's important to Apple and we need to be there.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's exactly the right the investment to do it.

[Jason Snell]

So Churchill, our strategy is not to simply be allow people to use chat GPT in our phones. Our strategy is not to buy another company and rebrand the product that this is. It's not as, it's not as ambitious a statement as what Sundar pichai said like 10 years ago when he basically said we are re pivoting the company towards AI just as we re pivoted toward, toward mobile and just as we found it on search. But it is like no, this is not just going to be a flavor enhancer that we're going to add to our products. We are going to be a part of our portfolio of skills will be AI. Not because it's a trendy thing, not because analysts are expecting it but because the guy at the very, very top knows that this is the next wave. We have an opportunity here and we are going to seize the hell out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, apologia that people often use with Apple which is we've rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac he said there was a smartphone before the iPhone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before iPod. But Apple invented the modern versions of those product categories. And this is how I feel about AI.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean there is an argument to be made that, that that could still be true. Right. The argument is what Apple's good at historically is creating products full on products that people want to use. And so from that worldview you could say a bare LLM may in hindsight not be a full on product but a feature that needs to be used to build a full on product. That would be the argument right Is that those earlier devices were, were improved because Apple kind of and this was Steve Jobs the superpower, right. Is these sort of like trying to see the bigger picture of like what is a full on product that someone would want. That's why he kept saying the computer for the rest of us, you know. And so that would be the argument. The counterargument would be that this isn't like that because Apple poo pooed the LLM and the LLM is the thing and that they, it's unlikely that they're ever going to be at the, you know, revolutionize it and be at the forefront. But I think it says something about what Apple views its strategy as is that bare AI is not a product, it's a feature. And that Apple's really good at banking products that people want to use. And so if they can crack all the right ways to fit AI into the products they sell, that will make people delighted, then they will have done their job.

[Andy Inatko]

And I think that also when you look at device based, device based AI, other people can do that. It's not like Apple's the only one that can do that. But Apple could potentially put an awful lot of development into that. Build a build. They have control over the hardware, so they can build the hardware so that it's really defined around that and then they provide it to the developers at theoretically no cost.

[Leo Laporte]

I would argue that at the stage we're kind of at right now with AI, I'm wearing two different AI wearables that are recording everything. You know, for a long time I wore the one from Bee that got bought by Amazon. I've got a third on the way. This is the Omi, this is the Rewind. I'm sorry, Limitless. They changed their name and I've got the field E coming and they all record everything and then analyze it and, and give you synopsis of your day, meeting notes, that kind of thing. I think that the wearable is the product. Right. Of course, now Apple may not think that it's something like this. It may be glasses.

[Alex Lindsay]

Effective glasses are AirPods or Apple Watch or something that is then powered by an iPhone.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, and Tim was, Tim was asked this question during the Q and A of the report earnings call and basically said the same thing that Sundar Pichai said as an analyst was saying. Well, but do you think that this is essentially, do you think that this is going to be a threat to iPhone sales? Is it going to whatever the next thing is, is it going to replace the iPhone? He said, no, I think it's going to be something you use alongside a phone. Which is something that I was glad to hear him say because if he said differently, I would think, what do I not understand? Because it seems so natural to me that a device that replaces an iPhone or a smartphone, a smartphone just does such a wide range of things. I can't imagine a simple AI device that can handle the load of all of those different tasks at once.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim said, I've never felt so much Excitement and so much energy before as right now. This is. It is kind of a cheerleader talk, right? Yeah, it's a.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it's a chair. I mean, I would say pep talk more than cheerleader because I don't think this is. I would not read this as, yay, we're doing great. I would read this as if you're not taking this seriously. If you don't think this is part of what our strategy is. If you can kind of like get along ignoring it, you must stop. Because it's central to what we're doing. We're investing in this. We want you to do it. He said everybody needs to be using this stuff and understanding it. And. And he said this is the future. This is just as revolutionary as the smartphone or the Internet. Right. Like he said that. And I think that that is, you know, honestly, depending. I think there are some people at Apple who are. Will take it more cheerleader, like, yeah, yeah, right. I think other people will see it kind of as a rebuke because they were people who were more skeptical and holding back. And I. What we've seen in the management changes this year is that some of the people who were kind of like holding back and being more kind of skeptical or academic about it are like, like the people who are running the Siri team lost those jobs, got transferred elsewhere. Because this is, you know, they are, they are serious and the eye of Sauron is now on all of them for this stuff. And I'm like, so, yeah, it's how you read it. But I would say say much more about making it clear that this is important rather than saying that everything is good, status quo. I don't think he was saying that.

[Jason Snell]

This isn't a special project. This is part of where we are. It made me think a little bit about, was it marker law back in the early 80s who sent that memo saying, hey, look, I mean, if we're telling people that our Apple II could be. Is a good word processor, why are we, why do we still have typewriters around the office? From now on, you're not going to get. If you, if you make a requisition for a typewriter, you're not going to get it. You're going to get a printer.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim said, the product pipeline, which I can't talk about. It's amazing, guys. It's amazing. Some of it you'll see.

[Alex Lindsay]

Mark Gurman, you already are, so I can't tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of it you'll see soon.

[Jason Snell]

I have never felt so much excitement and so much energy.

[Alex Lindsay]

Don't mention the thing. Don't mention the thing. Don't mention the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, fact, we're probably only about a month out. September 9th, you said Jason Snell. And now there seems to be some convergence. In fact, there was even a leak from stores in Europe.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's best guess. Yeah, September 9th.

[Leo Laporte]

And it does make sense. They don't want to do it. September 11th, they don't. You know, it makes sense.

[Alex Lindsay]

They like a Tuesday. They like a Tuesday. And that, that first Tuesday, because it's a Labor day is on the 1st of September this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that they don't like that. I think that's too early for them. So September 9th.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, it's easier now because you don't have a huge crew getting ready for a live event. But usually Mondays aren't good. If you want to move press around or anything else, you don't want to move around on the weekends. And so Tuesday, Tuesday's what the day almost everybody uses because you have the most amount of week for the press, because the press resets every week. So it's not Monday, which means no one has to prep on Sunday. It also means that all of Apple's PR people and everything else don't have to have their last meetings on Sunday.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they do have, it is a live event. Right. It's not a, it's not an, it'll be a pre recorded video event, but they will have to get all of the people there to move media around in Cupertino at the Steve Jobs theater because they do that now. And, and, and that is beyond habit. That is also another reason to put it on a, on a Tuesday. Although I think they did it the day after Labor Day one time. But like even, even a couple years ago. But even then it's not ideal. There, there are better choices.

[Andy Inatko]

So that's why after Labor Day with a live show and maybe five years.

[Alex Lindsay]

Ago or something like that, two years ago though, or three years ago, I was out in the desert and I drove home and I was like, am I really going to be at Cupertino tomorrow? And I was. And it was very weird. But generally, yeah. So I think it's the 9th. So yeah, it's right around the corner. We're going to get there real fast. New iPhone stuff. So no wonder Tim is just so excited.

[Leo Laporte]

As many as 15 new products next month or in the next couple of months.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, well, they'll stagger, right? They'll do a, they'll do a September event and they usually then follow it up with a. Either they'll do press releases or they'll do a, an October event somewhere. Sometimes they've done that in New York for influencers and press and other times they've just done it as pr. But they'll, they'll. This is their turning over their lineup as best they can before the holidays. So that's, that's what's coming next.

[Leo Laporte]

They also, according to Gurman, have an AKI team which is speaking of Robbie.

[Alex Lindsay]

Walker, the guy who got kicked off a series.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's the new head of that, answering to John Gianandrea. So is this knowledge, is this the team you don't want to be on the.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, maybe, but it sounds like what they've done is they've said basically you guys always felt like you were more academically inclined and kind of thinking big picture stuff. And if. And so it's like, okay, you, your job is to go build our Chat GPT. Your job is to build our world knowledge engine that is going to be able to be tapped into by our users instead of relying on ChatGPT to do it for those big picture questions, searching all knowledge in the world in order to give you an answer. And that's something that, you know, the rest of Apple, I think it's very clear, is focused on, on device and in private cloud computing, compute models that are going to be less capable of that kind of thing. And so they put this group off on the side and said you work on. And again, this is actually something we've talked about here before. The idea that like ChatGPT is there and maybe Gemini and maybe Claude, maybe other things will be there now integrated with iOS. But like in the long run, you probably would like to have the default be an Apple model and then let you choose other models. So that's what this is. It's like once you guys are good enough, enough with your model, we'll put it in ROS as the default. But until then just, you know, work with it over there.

[Andy Inatko]

Chat GPT did hand off, you know, Sam Altman did hand off. One of the reasons you may want to use Apple at some point in the future is like we might have to hand all your searches over to the government if they subpoena them. He just flat out said that. And so this is the, you know, I mean, I think Apple, Apple has the potential. They are behind, they've been behind before and they have the potential to build something that is far more private and potentially more Powerful than a lot of the other ones over time. So you know. But they've been the slow horse in almost every product line that they've been in.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And it's I think as never before. They have the benefit of all this research that has been worked on for 10 or 15 years by people who saw this coming early. But hey, you got people to copy off of or to learn from. So they're not necessarily starting from zero.

[Andy Inatko]

They have a highly, the biggest advantage that Apple has is a highly invested client base that has all their hardware, has all hundreds of movies or tens of movies in their Apple thing. Moving an Apple user is so hard because the ecosystem is so wound so tightly that they have a lot of time. People are still using AOL and they had a lot less time. Apple's got a decade to figure it out before it might look bad on own their stock, you know, on their quarterlies, but they've got a lot of time before it was a real emergency.

[Jason Snell]

I also got to wonder. It's been known for a long time that Apple has its own, has had its own spider out there on the web. Like has. What kind of data has that spider been collecting and will that help them to build this answer bot or are they going to have to basically write something brand new for it?

[Leo Laporte]

So that's what it stands for by the way I think I didn't mention is answers, knowledge and information. It sounds a little bit like a chatgpt or maybe even more like a perplexity which is more focused on that kind of thing. They see it as a service, part of their in house AI services that would then support something like a smart Siri and so forth.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, an answer engine capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you. It feels to me, especially given it's Robbie Walker Walker and John Jandrea, that maybe this is the equivalent of Silicon Valley TV shows putting somebody on the roof.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Or I was, I was thinking about that kid in second grade who stayed behind to help the teacher instead of going to third grade. It's a little bit like that. But again if this is a bigger longer term project and this is the stuff that they were always advocating, you know, it could be a little bit of both. Right. It's sort of like you don't want to be over here or we don't want you over here, but we'll put you over there. Where the. Because lot of this I think has come down to we need to ship something that works and that they were Unable to do it. And in this case, it's more like this is long term, you're not going to be pressured to ship this next year, so get the work going in a more, you know, R and D kind of role, really.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, I'm just glad Robbie's got something to do besides eat lunch. Yeah. In fact, it makes sense that Apple would, you know, try a number of different avenues. Do you think the buying Perplexity is still on the table?

[Jason Snell]

Unknown.

[Alex Lindsay]

There was a. Yeah, it's that rumor about what? Mistral. The French LLM is a stronger, I think, rumor. That makes more sense. Right. Because that would be. That would come with its own technology and be something that would probably fit into Apple pretty well. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cloudflare might have tanked Perplexity's chances with their. Although Perplexity responded pretty well, I thought, to the Cloudflare blog post. We'll probably talk about that tomorrow on Intelligent Machine.

[Jason Snell]

I think Perplexity was also getting some bad press this week about how they've been like, ignoring.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'm talking about, stuff that came out of Cloudflare. Yeah, we'll see. Probably given Apple's caution about taking on anything controversial at all, that might have put the kibosh on it. All right, little break. We're going to have some more in just a bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason. Jason in the House. Our show today, brought to you by Zoc. Doc, I'm. I'm worried about you. I'm worried about you. You're making a lot of excuses these days. Remember that doctor's appointment that you were supposed to make a while ago, but you. You kept. You kept pushing it off. You know the excuses. I'm too busy. I. I forgot where I put my insurance card. It's just a cold. It'll pass. Or it'll be fine. It'll heal on its own. I'd rather watch football or play that round of golf. Or frankly, I'd rather clean out the garage. Look, we've all been there. I understand booking a doctor's appointment is daunting, right? But this doesn't have to be the case. Thanks to zocdoc, those excuses are no longer valid. Zocdoc makes finding and booking a doctor who's right for you as easy as can be much easier than cleaning out the garage. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. I've used it myself. It's fantastic. With Zocdoc you can book in network appointments with more than 100,000 doctors and every specialty. I mean not just MDs, you got mental health professionals, dentists, primary care to urgent care. I was looking for gerontologist for my folks and I found them locally. In fact it's great because you can filter for doctors who take your insurance who are in the area and even are a good fit for you know, your particular style as a patient, any medical need that you might have because they've got hundreds of verified patient reviews. So you can read those reviews and find the type of care and support you're looking for. From good bedside manners, fast wait time to doctors with great listening skills. Whatever it is you need, you can find. And once you find that right doctor, you can actually right on the site see their actual appointment openings and choose a time slot that works for you and then click and you'll be instantly booking a visit. This is so amazing. Appointments made through Zocdoc happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. More often than not you can even get same day appointments which is great for that procrastinator that we all are, you know, well you're going, it's later today I use this and you should too. Stop putting off those doctor appointments. Go to ZocDoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Zocdoc.com MacBreak Zocdoc.com MacBreak we think them so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly and for their support of your health. That's important too. Wild. Tim Cook has now been CEO for longer than Steve Jobs. That's kind of amazing. We can't forget Steve. That's the problem.

[Jason Snell]

That's a very very long shadow, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it really is. So Steve will was Apple's CEO from 97 to 2,841 days. Official CEO from 2000 until his resignation in 2011. A total of 4,249 days. Obviously Mac rumors needed a little bit of something to write an article about. Tim Cook has now been CEO for 5090 days.

[Andy Inatko]

I mean you know I think that for Apple wouldn't probably exist without Steve Jobs and definitely wouldn't be in the should the hadn't hadn't been pointed in the direction that it is without Steve Jobs. But it wouldn't have gotten to the scale without Tim Cook.

[Leo Laporte]

Completely agree.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's interesting to sort of think about How a personality like Steve Jobs would have confronted some of the very, very specific and unique challenges that Apple faced in the past 10 years, particularly in the last, like, four years. It's like you're kind of happy. You have someone who's a bit more. A lot more diplomatic in that. See, in the 21st century, I love.

[Alex Lindsay]

Steve, but boy, people told. If people told him that his business was. I mean, like, the whole mindset of we're going to control it, we're going to take every last penny off the table. All that came from him because he was trying to bring Apple back from death. And if some government regulator told him that they had to change their policies, I mean, it would have been like. I mean, thoughts on Flash was stern, but it would have been much more stern than that. And I think it would have gotten them in trouble, but because he was not that kind of guy. That said, by now, even if Steve had had a clean bill of health and was still with us, he would have long since been just like, on the board or, or, or off. I think at this point, I don't think he would have stuck around in that job for that long regardless. But, yeah, he would not have been the most politic of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Going to a factory with Donald Trump and for all.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, no, yeah. I think for all of his good things that are unique and that should be applauded, there are also a bunch of things that he was probably really.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the right guy at the right time. He saved Apple. Not only did he create Apple, he saved it in the. That went by coming back, back when they were almost out of money getting an investment from Microsoft. But so, you know, both of them, Both of them deserve credit.

[Jason Snell]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a new candidate for the Apple card. As you know, Goldman Sachs wants to get out of it. We talked last week about JP Morgan Chase being interested. Now Visa, according to the Wall Street Journal, has said, hey, we would do it. They've offered Apple $100 million.

[Alex Lindsay]

Come on, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

That's chump change to Apple. That's nothing. To take over the credit card from a MasterCard. It is currently a MasterCard and it doesn't matter to me. I do have an Apple card. I use it kind of like all the time.

[Alex Lindsay]

What would. Is this just, like, inducement to get whoever, whatever bank takes it over to rebrand it as a Visa instead of a MasterCard because, like, visa is not a bank.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, this is exactly right. That's what the Journal says. Apple is expected to select a network for the card or it picks the bank to replace Goldman Sachs. So you pick the plumbing before you build the house.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. Because right now it's a MasterCard. And so I could see Visa saying, we really want that traffic. That would be really good for us. So let's get in there.

[Andy Inatko]

They don't have to deal with all the idiosyncrasies that Apple has. They just want the traffic.

[Leo Laporte]

Put up with the Apple.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. But a lot of those banks are partners of both. So they're like, we'll make it work worth your while to have it be a Visa card instead of a MasterCard card.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. And I think that again, it may not have worked in the current structure, but another bank being able to start over again looking at what the requirements are and looking at what the challenges are, they can now, you know, talk to people and gonna be, well, not only do they know what the deal is, but they can restructure how they build their setup so that it, you know, you're able to. When you're stuck in it. Once the, once the train is left and the wheels are going, it's very hard to change where the tracks are. But you can say, okay, I'm gonna build a different style of tracks and make it more efficient so that when it comes in, we can still do what Apple wants to do. Or they'll tell Apple to, you know, that they can. But I have a feeling what the. What Apple's going to keep holding out for because they've got their current partner on the hook for a while. So. So they have time to think about it and work through it. But I think what Apple's going to want is someone to restructure how they do what they do so that they can still provide the services that Apple's expecting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Having a network that is motivated like Visa might be would be helpful as a part of that for sure. I have one of my cards is a chip Visa. And so I mean, I could see that that is a. This may be a dovetail of those two stories. Right. Where there's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's going to become a chase Visa instead of being. Although mastercard.

[Leo Laporte]

Mastercard's not given up easily. They're fighting and amex wants to get in there too. So everybody wants the Apple business. That's.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, except Goldman Sachs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, except Golden.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, they accept that.

[Andy Inatko]

And again, we always remember that Gold. This was Goldman Sachs getting themselves into a retail business. They didn't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

When you say that they don't. They kind of didn't know what they were doing. So they're. But they're the only, only ones willing to put up with it because they didn't know what they were doing. And now what Apple's. What they've proven is they don't know what they're doing and that the other companies are able with a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience. If they say they can do it, they understand how deep that water is and they have a much better infrastructure to probably support it.

[Leo Laporte]

They did the same thing, actually, Visa did the same thing to MasterCard at Costco and came after Costco with big. And you can't use your MasterCard at Costco, which is weird. There aren't a lot of retailers I've been to where you.

[Andy Inatko]

I have almost no mastercards. Like, I. It's interesting. I, I just thought of that. I was like, I don't know if I have any MasterCard or.

[Leo Laporte]

You have an Apple card.

[Andy Inatko]

I have a Visa. I don't have an Apple card.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Andy Inatko]

I don't have an Apple card.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I do. It's beautiful. It's made out of metal.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I use my Apple Pay all the time. And so if I'm somewhere where they don't take Apple Pay but they take a credit card, it works fine too. So.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. And that's, I mean, for me, that's the number one reason to get a. An Apple card still only available in the United States, by the way, is they give you big discounts, extra discounts on purchases made via Apple Pay. So like you're really. You've got an incentive to use it as the default when you do tap to pay out in the world because you get. I Forget what is 4% off instead of 3 or 3 instead of 2? Something like. Between that and that, you get discounts on everything you buy from Apple. It can be worth it for somebody who spend a lot of money on apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I got $6.96 this week in Apple Cash.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, they keep feeding that cash to you.

[Leo Laporte]

It ends up I actually paid. I paid for the iPad for my daughter with Apple Cash. You know, the little leftover crumbs. Mac OS 26 Tahoe beta 5 is out.

[Alex Lindsay]

All the beta 5s are out.

[Leo Laporte]

Beta 5 for everything. Is the public beta updated?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, this is developer beta. So presumably this will then lead to a public beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I haven't found any, by the way. I even moved my iPhone. Finally, I gave up and it's been very reliable all around in every respect. One of the things that's Happening in the new Beta on Tahoe is the hard drive no longer looks like a spinning hard drive. They've replaced that icon. Nice job. 9 to 5 Mac. They've put it into a translucent trash can. And the new icon, it's kind of like an ssd. It's a little more generic.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I wish they should have put like the compact fluorescent light bulb and the incandescent light bulb in there too.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing how this stuff lives on. The skimo crap lives on.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they did do that. Right. With energy saver setting.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a light bulb anymore.

[Alex Lindsay]

Originally a light bulb, then it was a compact fluorescent and now it's an led. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You're paying attention.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I wrote a whole article about that back at Mac World when they went to the compact fluorescent light bulb instead. But they've since even changed it further because time marches on. I mean this is, this is a little like the floppy disk icon for save. Right. It's sort of like that a method. A metal hard drive that you would put in a Mac Pro basically at this point is probably not the best image to represent a mounted disk, which will probably be something you would attach via usb.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably an ssd, although you can't.

[Alex Lindsay]

It is an ssd.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Undoubtedly, undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Why would they update that and have it not be an ssd?

[Leo Laporte]

Japan has mandated that Apple must allow third party party app stores and payment systems. So the dominoes continue to fall. I imagine this is just going to be this way globally in a year or two. Right.

[Andy Inatko]

And we should see how many people actually use it so they can give it to them. And then the question is, I mean Google's had other stores for a long time, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but it goes beyond that. This week they released a draft edition of the guidance on what Apple and Google are going to have to do for a law that I think goes into to effect in December. And so it is like alternative app stores, but it's also third party. Developers need to have access to biometrics if they want to do. If they want to use the hardware on the, on the phone. If Apple is harvesting data from its users to improve its own products internally, then they have to be able to share that data with developers as well. I don't, I haven't. It's 130 pages long. Haven't I downloaded but haven't read it yet.

[Andy Inatko]

It.

[Jason Snell]

But the impression I get is not that developers should be able to see everything that Apple sees, but if Apple uses certain data and Metrics as developers who are building a chat app, developers who are building a mail app, developers who are building a browser, then they can't use that as a unique advantage over third party apps that do that sort of thing. It's a long, long list of things and yeah, it's going to be a mess. At this point you kind of imagine that they're going to have to. That they're going to have to basically re engineer their entire workflow and their entire structure for building operating systems and building these features to make sure that they can cut out a version that complies with each regulatory set of limitations that are in each part of the world in which they operate. A lot of these things are the same, but they're certainly not going to want to just simply make a blanket change to the worldwide edition of iOS or the worldwide edition of the App Store. They're still going to want to make sure that in each market they only have to do the bare minimum of what they are being ordered to do. And so I'm fascinated by how this affects their ability to continue to develop and update and manage all these different products internationally.

[Andy Inatko]

And it just may mean that releasing of the OS takes longer. What the result may be is that if you're in the U.S. you get the release at a certain date and then the dates in other countries are six months behind or whatever as they kind of work through whatever those things are and then they'll just tell people that that's why it's taking so long.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, no, it's probably going to be two or three. I imagine there's going to be a couple of different tiers. One tier being, okay, this is actually something that we can just basically roll into the main os. That's not really a big problem. There's going to be stuff where, okay, we will roll a special version of this for the specific market because we're definitely not going to extend that to the world. And then under certain very spicy situations, it will be okay. Guess what? You don't get cut copy and paste in Thailand. Oh well, we don't want to comply with this law. We think it's stupid. So you can't cut, copy and paste on iOS anymore. Complain to your local government about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't they throw some shade? I can't. I don't remember if it was in the analyst call or it was in the all hands meeting about how these countries were compromising Apple's product quality and security with these kinds of orders. I can't remember where I Saw them.

[Jason Snell]

And that might have been in their, their first official response to the DOJ's antitrust suit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that too, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

They finally exhausted their last attempt to get this dismissed, so they issued a formal, like, response to the doj. And it was basically the entire playbook that you would have imagined that, like, this is overreach, this is unnecessary, this is again, and it's stifling us. We have some of the most contented and loyal users and customers in the entire industry. It's not because we abuse them or abuse the market.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, Sandy. Competitive. Well, all right. So, yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

[Andy Inatko]

I mean, it all depends on the judges. It depends on how it goes. I mean, a lot of what you can't, you can't go into a court case going, well, sure, they're right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Andy Inatko]

So, so all of these are, are making the points that you're going to make. You have to make those points before. But usually you can't bring up new points unless there's new evidence in the appeals. You're not even playing for. I mean, Apple in this case is not even playing for the first ruling they're playing against. You know, the Supreme Court hasn't ruled anything. They've just chosen not to look at some cases. And every time this goes up, the Supreme Court may decide, oh, well, this is the one we'd like to take on. And the DOJ is using some creative licensing on how, okay, we're going to go by profit because Apple clearly doesn't have a monopoly on phones. They have 56, 57% of the United States market, less than 20% of the world market.

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Andy Inatko]

They're not, you know, like, they're not a traditional monopolist. And so, so they made something else up. But when you start making stuff up, you're kind of putting your building your house on sand. And so, so at any point in time, if you make something up, you get the wrong judge. If you're standing on bedrock, you don't need, you don't, don't care what judge it is, you don't care how it goes through. But if you build your house on sand, you got to get the right judge, you got to get the right appeal, and you got to make sure that the Supreme Court is in the right mood to, to win that. And I think that that's the, you know, like that. No, and it's all, you know, grew up, grew up watching it. It's, you know, they're they're, you know, they're the doj. I mean, people are winning this, but the DOJ is still. It's. It's a creative way of looking at monopolies. And so if you get creative about looking at things, then you have to get everything right. And so. So Apple's just poking holes at a. At a relatively weak case that they'll. That they still could lose. So.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean, there, there are parts of it that I, That I are. Are where the DOJ is playing, playing the classic hits. And I always enjoy, you know, the hey Jude of the DOJ antitrust stuff. I love, and I'll chant along with, and do the na na na na na na. But there is some stupid stuff about, oh, you're creating, you're stifling the creation of super apps. Like, what is a super app? Oh, well, we defined it thusly.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, I mean, they're making up something.

[Jason Snell]

That you're not allowing to happen in the app marketplace. Like a.

[Andy Inatko]

Okay, yeah, we, we defined a strawman and then we burned it down. You know, like. And so, so, like. And that's, you know, and the. And you know, they. And so it. But, you know, any case that goes to court, you can lose. So.

[Alex Lindsay]

So.

[Andy Inatko]

Or win. And so. So I think that, you know, Apple has probably, you know, they both have lots of money. Apple probably has better lawyers than what's in the doj, especially currently. And so, so it, it puts the DOJ at a little bit of a disadvantage, but their track record is. I mean, a lot of other people's track record has been good, so it looks like they might have a good chance of that, but it'll still take years to work its way through the system. And the more Apple puts up what they're doing, the longer it will take.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't mention that. Tim also said that the Tahoe beta is the most popular developer beta in Apple's history. I don't know how they. I mean, I don't know what that even means, but I think people are.

[Andy Inatko]

I think people are more and more used to downloading the beta. I think it's just that more people have said, okay, I'm willing to take on a beta. They get used to it. They get used to the automatic. I think people have gotten more comfortable with public betas.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that is an interesting data point. Like I was saying before, I thought it was interesting that they spent so much time talking about the new iOS again, as though that was going to be like a major revenue driver. A Signature moment for Apple as opposed to a very, very, very ambitious update. But that does show that there are people who are responding so well to the pitch that was being, that was made at WWDC that they're like. Even people that are not necessarily people who would sign up for, for a public beta are like, I want my iPad to do this right now. I don't want to wait for it, so I'm going to download it. That augurs very, very well for the platform that's going to exist in September.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Interesting story about a man using an iPad, controlling it with his mind. This is from a company called Synchron. It's a embedded chip. Man has als, he's using his iPad without touching it, without eye tracking, without voice. He's just thinking, it's a fascinating movie you can watch here. And it's because Apple built in the switch control feature, which is fantastic. So it's interfacing to the switch control. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. It's pretty wild. I recommend the video. Video? Yeah, from Synchronous. Y N C H R O N.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

This is, this, this is why, like Apple's made. Apple's investment in accessibility has just been above and beyond what any other company has really even considered to be feasible, let alone like what they've actually done. And it's, this is not just. This is because. This is because 15 years ago they decided that accessibility is a right, not a nice thing to do, not charity was the saying. I forget the saying, but there's a saying that goes along those lines, that we do this because we need to have this work with everybody who wants to use it, not because, oh, well, we'll find these edge cases in which we can actually make this thing work with this other device. So it's a philosophy, it's a corporate culture, and we're seeing exactly what's possible when a company's on board to that degree.

[Leo Laporte]

Synchron's brain computer interface, its BCI chip, actually doesn't have to be surgically implanted. It's implanted through the blood vessels. And they say this is an existing system that we are planning to roll out soon. They're planning wider access, so very interesting. Apple supports the interface across iPad, iPhone, and even Vision Pro Pro. Well done. It's a nice part.

[Jason Snell]

Big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a very big deal.

[Jason Snell]

Especially because it doesn't involve like actual implant into the brain because the, the, the, the there's been a lot of really good progress being made on these kind of neural implants. But the problem is at some point the, these, the, at some point these wires have to come out. How do you put. What do. What is the long term viability of this device? How much maintenance is it going to use? So that's, it's very, very exciting. As a non expert in accessibility health, the synchron technology looks really, really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple TV plus has introduced a podcast, an Apple original called Unicorn Girl. Meet Candace. She's a mother of two, a nurse and CEO and founder of multiple million dollar companies. How about that, huh? Candace is the kind of person who seems like she can have everything she ever wants wanted. She could save the world and look good doing it. Okay, fine. But I guess there's probably a secret in her life, huh? So there's, I guess, is it audio? Is it I guess or is it video? I don't know. Sounds. Seems like it might be audio. Yeah, it's audio only.

[Jason Snell]

That does sound like the first three sentences of a lifetime Christmas movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Feels a little like that.

[Jason Snell]

But then her perfect life gets all twisted around when her little sister arrives from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't, I can't tell if it's a true story or a fiction. It's from the creator of Scamanda. Scamanda Award winning journalist Charlie Webster investigates Candace's rise and fall. Which sounds like it's real, but I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

Does anybody get murdered? I understand that in podcasts of the scale someone gets murdered.

[Leo Laporte]

Very helpful. If somebody can get murdered. I believe that is a big part of it. There will be a new Apple TV this year, yes? No, we don't know, but the rumors are strong. In fact, I saw one blogger say, you know, this could make Apple be more important to gaming than PlayStation or Xbox put together together.

[Jason Snell]

It is like, like I said a month ago, it's a hell of a gaming console. Like if you, I mean if you just consider it that way. Even if like you, you, you're already, you already have like a, you already have a console. You have a, a streaming box that can automatically transcode upscale things from HD to 4K million different features. Having this as a game, as a $100 game console is not a stupid thing, especially with a subscription to Apple architecture Arcade. It's something you can leave in the living room and you know your kids are not going to get into too much trouble with it.

[Andy Inatko]

I think Apple still needs to, I don't know whether it's Apple Arcade or something else. Fund something that really pushes the envelope of what the devices can do. Like a lot of the games in Apple Arcade are kind of, they're fun but they're not like pushing anything graphically that is difficult. And I think Apple has the opportunity to prove that they can do those kinds of things and even drive hardware sales. I mean the iPad, the. That could be great. A Mac mini, an M4 Mac mini could be a really great gaming device.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that would be the interesting thing. What if you put an M1 or M2 in an Apple TV? I mean right now it's got an A15 bionic, three years old.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. Usually whenever they release it, it's a version or two older of what the.

[Leo Laporte]

Phone had or something. They got a lot of extra parts.

[Andy Inatko]

Or ones that aren't quite as fast as they ran for the devices. Yeah, you take ones that are on the outside of the way for safer and you know, no one's going to notice it in Apple TV because it's so much, it's so overpowered compared to what every other set top box is not. I mean it's like four or five times more powerful than the next one.

[Jason Snell]

Which is why it's like for people who just want a streaming box, it's two or three times needlessly expensive.

[Andy Inatko]

I keep coming back to, I don't think the chip affects the price very much.

[Jason Snell]

Cool. But okay. Well at least it's still like more expensive than like the 20 or $30 streaming tab. That again for people who just need to get Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and a couple other things. As long as they have enough storage space, people are going to be happy with that. But the reason why I keep coming back to Apple Arcade is that whatever chip they put into the model that comes out this year. And by the way, this story comes from someone who a source that spoke to Mac rumors about it that they're saying, yeah, Apple's still on track to release a new Apple TV. Whatever chip they put into a 2025 Apple TV is going to be powerful enough to run a AAA games for sure. But my question is that are the people who want to run a AAA game, are they going to be thinking, I don't want to have an Xbox, I don't want to have a PlayStation, I want to have an Apple TV box. So I mean Apple's working very, very hard to make sure sure that to accommodate developers, game developers, to make sure they can put their apps on Mac. But I don't know if the market is interested in a streaming box for that platform. If it can run Steam, that's great. And that's pretty much all they want to do. But again, it's hard for me to figure out the appeal of that. I would more be interested if and when this thing comes out. I want to hear your teardown, Alex, because it seems to me as though the big opportunity is not necessarily games, but as a host organism for Apple TV that whatever features they want to put into their streaming service, be it quality, be it hdr, be it speed, or be it just, hey, there are things we can have. Multiple points of view, multiple camera angles, multiple feeds of information that you can only get when something is streaming through Apple tv. On an Apple TV tv.

[Andy Inatko]

You know, I feel like Apple could, you know, again, I feel like they could change the game a little bit if they started to support 120 frames per second at 4K. You know, they technically the current, the newest Apple TV can do that. It just doesn't do it. Like, it doesn't give you the, it doesn't give you the tool to get to it. But the HDMI out and the horsepower built into it are absolutely capable of going 120 frames per second at 4k. And why would you do that? Because I have a bunch of. I have my phone and tons of other things that can capture 120 frames per second. And so the thing that Apple could do, I don't think they're going to, but. And I think this has more to do with culturally. I think there's a lot of people that make content for Apple that are really, you know, attached to legacy formats like 23.98. So the, so the, so they're really attached. They don't see why you would want to do that. But if, and the problem that they have is, is that if people started shooting 120 frames per second with their phone and they started putting it on there and watching it. As someone who works with 120 frame a lot, if you start watching it 24, you start seeing the frames like 24, it's like it feels very flickery when you get used to 120 frames per second. And so people start taking their home movies that they could shoot with their phone and just sharing it over to the Apple TV and seeing 120 frames per second, it looks like a window. It is really compelling. And they're going to start being, you know. But Apple then would have this whole opportunity to, you know, as you see all this production with the phone and.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything else is Insisting Apple TV do that.

[Andy Inatko]

No, it won't let you. It can so hardware wise, yes it can. Software wise, no you don't. It doesn't give you anything higher than 60.

[Leo Laporte]

And there are a lot of TVs out now that can do 120 or even 240.

[Andy Inatko]

Almost all, almost every TV you buy can do up to 240 frames a second. I mean the cheaper ones may be only 120. Computer monitors are all over, over the place. But when you buy a tv, remember it's got all that extra stuff where it turns your 24 into 100. You know, like the smooth motion or.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever that they call it interpolation.

[Andy Inatko]

Interpolate what people hate and for good reason. I mean it's just making things up, you know. You know, so it's ugly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

But there's a difference when people make a mistake of is there's a difference between converting 23.98 or 24 frames a second to 120 and actually shooting 120. You know and right now really impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Even a DVD, even the UHD DVD players, I don't see sync can do 120.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, they, anything that's got a. I think it's HDMI 2. It's either 2.2 or 2.4.

[Leo Laporte]

What sources are there? Are there any.

[Andy Inatko]

No, there's very few sources.

[Leo Laporte]

So Apple really could own this market.

[Andy Inatko]

Well if they had a. And they, if they did their use their phone, their phone now can, you know easily does, does 120 frames per second.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

And so now you could be pushing this whole market towards a. Pushing, pushing the rest of the market in a place that Apple can do almost automatically and nobody else is, you know like. And that, that's Apple's specialty is the.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to put everybody in my 24 cable in the box. You'd have I think most people's cables are probably.

[Andy Inatko]

But you could tell them what that is. I mean you can tell them what to go get. And, and their, their, their, their TV if those bought in the last five years will do it, their Apple TV already can do it. If they release a new one definitely. And then their, and their phones over the last what five or six years have been able to, to capture the, that and so Apple has a lot of stuff that's already built in. You know the Apple like for instance the Mac Mini. I connect Mac Minis to projectors that and the Mac minis do 120 frames a second. It looks amazing. So, so it is. So those are that's the kind of stuff that Apple could theoretically do that forces the market to play a game that only they can win and that it seems like it's such a really. And then what it would do is then drive other companies because these camera Cameras can capture 120 frames a second. So you, you can capture on a, on a Blackmagic camera and some of the other cameras, Blackmagic, you can turn it up to 120 at 4K, even at 8K. And so you can turn that up right now in a lot of the larger Blackmagic cameras to go ahead and capture 120 frames a second. So the industry would then have to respond to or would have the opportunity to respond. And it would. The only platform that would support support it would be Apple TV plus. So, so anyway, so it. I don't. I think that it's very unlikely Apple will do that, but that's what they could do. It would put. And again, if you started watching lots of shows at 120 frames per second or more importantly MLS. So if MLS was running at 120 frames a second all the time, your other sports channels would look really bad. Like it's one thing to talk about film being 23.98, but sports channels, live sports loves frames like frame rate. I mean a lot of sports channels do 720 because they want 60 frames a second, you know, in the same transport window. And so, you know, being able to do 4K120 of MLS or F1 or other things like that would be incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd need HDMI 2.1 to do the 4K120. Although there is, there is a newer standard now 2.2 came out earlier this year. It has 96 gigabit.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, I think that's 8K120. 96 gigabit I think is 8K120.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, I will, you know, I don't even need it and I'm just such an Apple TV fan that I would just buy it anyway. If they do come out later this year, sometime in between September and the end of the year, probably not at the iPhone.

[Andy Inatko]

You know the best thing I think I talked about, I talked about a couple weeks ago, the best thing is with old Apple TVs you throw them in your, in your suitcase and then you just wait to the, you just get to the. Wherever you're going. And now you, even if you're just sharing to it, you just take over whatever TV you run into.

[Jason Snell]

Just yellow. So you don't leave it behind the Pico little black box the size of a hockey puck. Yeah, that's gonna be overlooked.

[Andy Inatko]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

The Pico Mac Nano which I think you talked about last week.

[Alex Lindsay]

Andy recommended it and we all bought one.

[Leo Laporte]

You're lucky because they're not selling the pre assembled ones anymore. I thought I saw that, I thought I saw that behind you there. It was actually displaying it.

[Jason Snell]

I thought it was just really, really, really, really, really, really far away in the back.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, this is a, it's like a 2 inch high Mac with a 1 inch diagonal screen. It's got an SED, you can boot things. It's a original Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

So what are you running on it? Because it looked like you had a Mac.

[Alex Lindsay]

I had like Mac right open, but you can take any disk image and you put it on an SD card and it'll boot off of that instead. So I've got to experiment a little more and get a better disk image with it. My frustration with it is the disk image that comes on, it has Mac paint, but when you try to launch it, it says it needs more memory, which isn't how that's supposed to work anyway. But the point is it's this super cool tiny thing where the guy who developed this, Nick Gillard, he built his own circuit board in order to get it to fit inside this little tiny enclosure that's running, you know, an emulator. Really just like amazing kind of work that he did. But Apple contacted him and said, you know, especially your replica of our box, you're using all of our kind of stuff. But I think he said, look, they were very nice. And they said, they just said don't sell the pre assembled ones.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can still get all the.

[Alex Lindsay]

Parts at his website, which is one bit rainbow.com, you can still get all the parts and make it yourself, assemble it yourself and have fun with it. It is, I mean it's the original Mac so its ability to run software is limited. There's a lot of stuff that worked on the later Macs that won't run on this thing because it is, it is meant to be that original Mac. But I just love the idea of it. And it really, you know, it, it works. I, I literally have to take my glasses off and hold it right next to my face in order to see what's going on because it's a diagonal screen. But I was able to plug in a mouse because the way it works is that there's just USB on the back, but it comes with an adapter. Or I guess if you're buying the parts, you'd buy the adapter that's power and a USB port. And then I plugged in a mouse, a USB mouse to it and you can click around and I mean like it's, it's real. It's like something that looks like you're looking into a kaleidoscope or something or a View Master. And it's like it's a perfect model except it works, it runs software, it doesn't do sound. I mean there's lots of limitations to it. But the fact that he was able to get the hardware and fit it into this little 3D printed original Mac case that's 2 inches high and, and that like the screen turns on and you can move a mouse around. What a great idea. So thank you Andy for suggesting it especially since we got in right under the wire when now you have to assemble it yourself.

[Jason Snell]

Now I'm sad I've to buy the parts myself. And how many, many of us like think highly enough of Apple to think that like an email message went out on campus saying okay, now we're gonna tell them to stop like taking pre orders and stop selling it on three day in three days time. So if you want one of these, make sure you put in your order right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they?

[Jason Snell]

I, no, I don't know. I'm guessing no. I'm guessing that there, there's some of these all over the Apple campus.

[Alex Lindsay]

Probably they were very generous with them and gave them, gave him a warning and basically he had like three days to take off the pre and he sent out a message saying I'm going to have to take the pre orders down three days. So you might want to order it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because everybody who did order before then will get one.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, he'll get one, you'll get one and you can still order the parts. And they didn't say take that down, you must not. They really just were. The idea of productizing this completely, I think that ticked over a little legal line for them. But the one that I got here. So not only is it a replica of the original Mac box, but it's literally for people watching on the video version it's literally a replica of, of the whole thing including like the top insert and what's in the box. And the Mac is in the box and the little container containing the documentation is in the box and that's where the adapter went. And in fact he even includes a little hex tool and he made this because the original Macs could be taken apart with a Hex tool. So he has it where you can heat set in these little tiny hex screws in the same place. Place and take the two pieces of the enclosure apart using the same technique. Just, I mean breathtaking. And the fact again, a, a fully functional, well, fully. A mostly functional 2 inch high original Mac. What an amazing thing. So you could still make this a little, a little handy project if you want to have fun just by ordering the parts from one bit Rainbow.

[Jason Snell]

I'm just, I have to pull my nerd card. It's not a hex screw. It was a T15 Torx.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, you're right, a Torx. It was a Torx. Well, this one is a, is like an Ike screw. But it's the, it's the thought that counts.

[Jason Snell]

I just love that. It's like I've seen a lot of hey look, we made a tiny, tiny little Mac and it's, it's great. You love to see that kind of initiative and creativity, but something's off about it. Or they say, oh, we can only buy this kind of a panel from AliExpress. So we made it adapt to this. This is like again, you would not know. It looks like a classic Mac that is far, far away. But it is in front of you on your desktop.

[Alex Lindsay]

A finder. It's open to the finder right there.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

David Pogue said you may be wondering what happened to me for the last few years.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean he's been doing his Sunday morning CBS stuff.

[Andy Inatko]

He has the best job, makes up whatever he wants and does and puts it on CBS Sunday morning and has.

[Leo Laporte]

Eight Emmys to show for it. He has a new book that will be out for Apple's 50th anniversary. It's called Apple the First 50 Years. $50 for the hardcover version. You have to pre order because it won't be out till next year, March of next year. But it is available now for a pre order. And it is big.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like a copy table book. 600 pages, 300 plus color photos and.

[Leo Laporte]

Interviews, new interviews and others.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, so not just a rehash. David was always so. I was one of David's many editors at Macworld because he was a Macworld columnist before he was a New York Times columnist. And so what people, you know, he's great at this because not only is he good at interviewing and good at talking to people, but I have a hard time thinking of somebody more qualified to write a high level overview. He has the Apple cred from Macworld. He has the tech journalism cred from the New York Times and all of David's pieces. Even when he was writing about super nervous nerdy topics. Like he wrote a whole feature for me about the Palm Pilot. Right. Like for Macworld. He, he, he is always thinking about it on a very high level of like regular people. We talk about Steve Jobs being concerned about like regular people using stuff. David Pogue is a lot like that. He, he, this is going to be really readable and accessible to a large audience which is why I think his publisher is probably really happy that he put this together and that it's going to have a lot of pictures, color pictures on top of it. Like this is not going to be a dense, nerdy book about Apple history. This is going to be, I would imagine, a really fun romp illustrated through Apple history which for the 50th anniversary, which is coming up next year, that's April 1st, right.

[Leo Laporte]

2026.

[Jason Snell]

And his point of view is amazing. Like he was one of the people who had, I don't want to call it the blessing, I don't know if I'd call it a curse, but definitely not a blessing of getting phone calls from Steve Jobs at 2:00am Taking you to task by something you said or something you wrote or it's like, okay, that's a hard, that's, that's a hard thing to go to voicemail. So I'm really excited. But I did, I am in the book because he called me a few weeks ago to fact check something. So I'm trying to convert that into a free copy. But if I don't get a free copy, I'm definitely buying one.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, he's so good at taking a bunch of complex stuff and a whole bunch of stuff and just, and just isolating it down to the stuff that matters. And by the way, if you're not, if you don't see, he's really fun. He does really great segments on CBS Sunday mornings. All of them are available on YouTube. Just search David Pogue, CBS Sunday Morning and you'll see them all. And so you don't have to find the time to go watch it, they're all on. They cut them all up and put them on YouTube and he always finds great topics and digs into them and makes them interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple First 50 Apple F I R S t50.com and it's available for pre order pretty much everywhere right now. Simon and Schuster will be publishing it and it's a big thick 600 page book with 150 new interviews. So he really put, you know, he could have done, you know, just historic stuff, but he put a lot of work into this.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's great.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think only, only somebody like David at this point, given that especially at Walt Mossberg is retired, there are very few journalists who would even be able to attempt to get this level. I was going to say, like, like, I mean, let's be honest. Have I thought about writing a book about Apple with lots of pictures in it? I have, but I'm not sure I could get, I could crack the level of, of people to make it worthwhile. David Post Rogue has a name that opens doors. I think he's the perfect choice for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. We'll look forward to it.

[Alex Lindsay]

We love David. I edited his column in the back page and all the features that he did for a little while before he left us for the New York Times. And he's always great to work with and we went on a bunch of those Matt cruises together. Leo, you went on some of those with us too. Yeah, David, great guy. A lot of fun. That's going to be a fun. This is, I guarantee, guarantee it it will be a fun book to read because David doesn't write. Not fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Great writer, very talented, nice guy. And a hell of a piano player.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. Well, he was, you know, he was Stephen personal. Yeah, personal tech guru for Stephen Sondheim. Like when Stephen Sondheim had a problem with his Mac, he called David Pogue and David would come over and help him out. What a. Oh man, the stories. And of course there's that famous story about, about how high level Apple people came over to his house with the original iPhone because he was one of the early reviewers and they literally like came to his house and had dinner and gave him the iPhone. Like what a. He's got a bunch of good stories like that.

[Jason Snell]

He's one of maybe three different tech journalists. Although he's gone beyond that right now that if he were just to write a memoir, I would write, I would buy the hell out of that memoir. He's got so many stories and used.

[Leo Laporte]

To be on our shows quite a bit, but got way too famous for that.

[Alex Lindsay]

CBS now maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Let's take a little break and when we come back, we will get your picks of the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason. The show today brought to you, literally brought to you by our content delivery network, CashFly. For over 20 years, CashFly has had the track record for high performing, ultra reliable Content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know about Cash Fly because, well, maybe you've heard me say, say. Bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is provided by cash fly at c-a C-H-E-F l y.com twit we actually cashfly saved our bacon maybe 15 years ago when we were desperately trying to figure out a way to get hundreds of thousands of people to download our shows without killing our servers. Matt Levine at Cashfly came over and said hey, I can help you. And man, we've been using Cashflies ever since. We love their lag free video, their hyper fast downloads, their friction free site interactions. The proof is in the petabytes. We literally deliver many petabytes a month via Cash Fly. And I know because events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide with less than 1 second latency. Online games start 70% faster, scale instantly and play without lag. Software downloads flawlessly during release releases, patches and updates, HD video plays on demand with ultra fast sub second start on every device and podcasts reach global audiences in record speed at any scale. Content delivery is a tough thing to do, but cashflow has been in this business longer than almost anybody. They know how they focus on bringing you the best performance. They deliver rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. Plus you can do something now with Cashfly we've been doing for years shield your site content in their cloud, which means you never have a cash miss 100% cash hit ratio. Trust me, that's important. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. CashFly is like gaining an extension of your team when your entire business model depends, as ours does. In delivering massive amounts of content content, you can't afford to go it alone. Trust me, I know. You can count on personalized help anytime from a tenured expert who gets it. Engineer to engineer 24 7. Right Patrick? Right. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com twitcashfly.com TWIT c a c-h e f l y.com we thank him so much for supporting us for so long. And I was Matt Levine's guest by the way, on his podcast the Anycast. He did a great interview which is now up on the Anycast podcast in case you missed it. 20 years at the edge of tech with Leo Laporte. So thank you Matt for doing such a great interview. It was a lot of fun talking to him and we had we go back we go back a way or two. CashFly.com TWIT thank you, CashFly. All right, let's get some picks. I'm going to start because I was very pleased to see that the ad blocker that I've used forever on everything is finally now available for Safari. Now it's not an easy thing to do because Safari has some real restrictions on ad blockers, much like Google's Chrome does. Raymond Hill Gorehill, the guy who does UBlock origin, made an U block Origin Lite for the new version of Chrome and apparently I think that stimulated his production of the same thing for Safari. I'm running it on the iPad. It runs on the iPhone, runs on the Mac. It is hard to find because Apple Search sucks. But search for ublock Origin Lite and you want the one by Raymond Hill. Accept no substitute. This is a fantastic ad blocker that even lets you turn filters on and off and do all the things that the traditional ad blocks blockers do. All their filter lists are not all of them. Many of them are there as are Easy list and Easy Privacy and Peter's Lowe's ad and tracking server list, both of which are very helpful for turning off those annoyances like Cookie Cookie blockers Cookie the annoyance announcements free in all the app stores. Just so you know.

[Jason Snell]

Indianako Pick of the Week we're talking about vintage Max. How about Vintage Lisa? This is a really, really cool project by a developer by the name of Andrew Yaros. It's called Lisa gui. It's not necessarily an emulator of the Lisa. It is a. He's reproducing the entire Lisa Lisa graphic user interface and experience using just Java and basic web techniques. So you can just you go to lisagui.com and it will just simply you get the boot sequence for for the Lisa. It will warn you that again it's not an emulator. It's some face elites. It's Apple can't really strike it down because he's not reusing Lisa's source code. You can either install it inside your browser browser as native code or you can just click the try button and it will still run. You just can't save documents but you get the full like Lisa interface and there is an actual working Lisa in a computer store repair shop museum in Boston for which I provided the Twiggy drives. It's like they were my Twiggy drives. I've I've had as an ornament in my office for like 20 years and he needed them to restore it to full condition.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And it's freak you. It freaks you out because it's like, oh, well, okay, well, I want to close that window. Well, no, that's not a closed box. It's a disk icon. You have to close a window. You have to go to Housekeep the housekeeping menu. And then. Oh, sorry. You have to. You have to go to file and. And select Put away or set aside. The scroll bars don't necessarily do things. It looks like the Mac, but not anything works the way that you want it to. If you want to create front of Word Process, you have to basically create a copy of a sheet of paper and then type on that sheet of paper again. It is trippy as hell. I also like the fact that in the menu bar, it's says how many frames per second you're running at. I'm running at 60 frames per second. It's only in alpha. It's in alpha right now. So basically, what you would think of as the finder works fine. The puzzle and desk utilities work, the LISA type paper works, and a couple of demos. But he intends to do Lisa calc, Lisa draw, like, the entire thing. And again, it is such a trip for someone who is. I'm so sorry that people don't get to experience some of these old technologies like the way they were actually run. Lisa emulation is very, very hard because the roms you need are hard to find. It's not as easy as emulating the Mac because of the lack of support. There are some projects, but you can't just open a URL and 20 minutes later be actually using these apps. And this is a chance to actually go back to 1983, before or at an easier time when this poor, poor, innocent Lisa did not know that it was about to be. Was about to be crushed by an arrow in the back shot by one of its own executives.

[Leo Laporte]

Very cool. Very cool. Lisa Gooey. There you go. If you've never seen it, you'll be amazed.

[Jason Snell]

Even got the shade of color in the screen. Right? It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it is pretty amazing. Thank you, Andy. That is L I S a G U I dot com. Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

All right, first, before we do that for the people watching on video, let's see if I can.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at that. Oh, it's so little. It is a Mac.

[Alex Lindsay]

You can actually see it's going on. And look, there's a cursor moving there.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just kind of incredible that all those things are possible.

[Jason Snell]

Did you park the heads of the drive before you picked up the machine?

[Alex Lindsay]

Unfortunately, no. So I've cracked my heart out.

[Jason Snell]

Damn.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a crying shame. We were talking as the show was getting started, we were talking about all the things you can do with a sous vide machine. It's been a few years since seemingly everybody recommended sous vide stuff on this show, so I thought I would mention I recently had to replace my original. I actually ended up with another Inoke nova Precision Cooker 3.0. I think it's aces. I think it's really great. It's got like Wi Fi or Bluetooth or whatever. It doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the original and, yeah, I never used it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Mine finally kind of died. And there are other ones that look cool, but they don't have. What you really want is the controls need to be on it. Some cookers are like, you just use our app. It's like, you know what, to set the temperature of a thing. In my kitchen, opening an app is not the way, like you can have an app, but to require fire an app, no go. It's not going to happen. So this thing, it's got a little, you know, touch screen on it. You can set it to be what you want. It's obviously its primary purpose is to cook stuff, right? The idea that you can take. Take a steak and. And cook it to exactly medium rare. And then it will just reach it and sit there and then so it's perfectly done every time you can sear it on the outside. It's like, really easy to do. But I had two other tips. One of them was the one I gave to Leo a couple weeks ago, which is you can also just put cold water, water in a pot or in a plastic tub or whatever you want to use, and stuff that's frozen in a waterproof container like a Ziploc bag. And you circulate it at no temperature, at lowest temperature. And the active circulation is a speed thaw. So you can thaw frozen stuff way faster in a sous vide machine. Turned down all the way. And the latest thing is a couple weeks ago, somebody asked me what, why there was no action in the lava lamp that is behind me. And in fact, it got in a weird state and then I agitated it a little bit and there were little blobs everywhere. And I thought, you know, what would be the solution here is to use the sous vide bath and put the little glass thing of the lava lamp in it to get everything so warm that all of the Wax kind of like melts and then goes where it needs to go and returns it to its clear state. Here, here. A lesson that I learned from decrystallizing honey, which is another thing you can do in a sous vide.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm looking for that, too. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, like, once you get this thing that circulates water and holds it at a given temperature, there is so much science you can do, and some of it even tastes good. So check it out.

[Andy Inatko]

It will ruin a lot of things for you, like chicken. And what I mean by that is, you get used to cooking chicken at 145 degrees, because if you leave it in a sous vide, you don't have to go to 165. You can go to 145. In fact, you can go to about 137, but it gets red, and people don't like it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. The temperature. Temperature that we all have been trained for is the temperature at which instantaneously everything is killed. But you can go at a lower temperature if you hold it there for 15 minutes or half an hour, and then it's perfect, and you can't overcook it.

[Andy Inatko]

The problem is you get used to 145, and no matter what you do to it at 165, you're like, this tastes. This is like chimney. Not as good. It's just not as good. It's not as good. And so it's just. I use it all the time for chicken. And then. Then when you're entertaining people, and a lot of times I have two or three of these out, and because I've got chicken at one temperature and I've got steak at another temperature, and you get a couple tri tips or rib eyes or whatever in there, and they're just sitting there waiting for people to show up. And you've got your grill up full tilt, and so you're just sitting there. When they get there, you put in your grill for a minute on each side at 800 degrees, 900 degrees. If you've got a big green egg and you cut it off and it's the best thing, stake them around.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, for me. For me, it was pork because, like, it's a. It's like when I was growing up, like, you're used to, okay, this is just to. To cook it to a safe temperature, renders it dry and leathery. And so I just did. But with the sous vides, like, oh, it's actually kind of pink inside, but it's perfectly safe. It was, like, as tender as chicken. The other thing that, the other thing that I'd like to evangelize about, about it is that once it's, it's not like cooking in an oven where once it's done, you have to pull it out of the oven or else it'll overcook. Basically, once it's cooked, there's an amount of time after which, okay, great, the chicken is cooked. Whatever it is, it's cooked, it's safe to eat. But then you get about a two hour window in which it will just simply hold, not cook anymore. The texture might change if you go three hours, but it will hold. And this is the reason why, for instance, like every time, time I've cooked Thanksgiving dinner, it's like, no, I'm doing the turkey. I'm an okay cook. But the biggest Achilles heel is if you have to serve dinner. And all the, the, the, the, the, the turkey and all the sides have to be ready and done and tabled at the same time. How do you get all that stuff circum to, to, to, to synchronize? You don't have to. It's like, I just know that if we're going to eat sometime around 1:1 and so if I, if the turkey is ready at around 12, maybe a little after that, I will, it does, it doesn't matter. It will not be overdone. I can simply. Okay, what time are the mashed potatoes done? What time are the green beans done? Great, now I'll, now I'll pull the turkey, sear it to give it a. That's the one thing it doesn't do. It doesn't give you that, that mallard.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I'm recommending a product called the precision cooker. But the precision is for the temperature. One of the things that it gives you is, doesn't require you to be precise with time. It's very hard to screw this up. You can do it. Alex once went on a trip and left meat sous vide.

[Andy Inatko]

Not at the current one, not in the current one.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's hard to do.

[Andy Inatko]

Makes a lot of noise. And you see it. Not, not a lot of noise, but it makes noise. I had an original one. This was a different product, sous vide supreme or something. And it didn't make any noise. And so it was closed. And it wasn't clear if it was closed. You just had no sense that it was on. And I put, I used to take the little steaks at Safeway that were already prepackaged and they've got like, they're packaged in burgundy or something like that and throw them in for an hour and a half and it's like a great steak coming right out. You don't do anything. You literally take the bag and just put it in. People tell you not to do it, but I used to do it all the time anyway, so. And, but then I put one in and then, you know, busy packing and forgotten. Went to Europe, so came back and it, it's all liquid, just in case you're wondering. But outside of that, it's very, very hard. You do have to get a, A either resealable. I mean, you can do it with freezable freezer quality Ziploc bags. If you do it, put it in slowly. But I have a. You know, the other thing you get is a food saver and you, you ziplock and you get pretty good at it. And the trick for me is rosemary. If you just take your chicken or steak and you put. You get some flaky salt on both sides. You get. I put, I put a little tab of butter in there and then I put a sprig of rosemary, which I have a bush over outside. So I just go grab some and put them in. And the rosemary, for some reason, for the chicken especially and for the steak, it takes it to another level pretty quickly. And you don't have to do any. There's no work.

[Alex Lindsay]

So buy one. Also, you can fix your lava lamp.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't need to buy the bucket that it goes really, you're just buying that stick that goes. Going in any kind of Tupperware bucket.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have a clear plastic bucket now that I use because it has some advantages, but for the first like four years that I did this, I just used one of our pots. Fine.

[Leo Laporte]

They want 100 bucks for their plastic.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh, don't get their bucket.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, there's. Amazon has ones that are the exact same shape that are way cheaper than that. Let me tell you.

[Andy Inatko]

They have. Yeah, they have great. Amazon has great ones that are built for this. If you do sous vide and It'll be like $15. And then you get. I have. There's a little sleeve that you can go on it that makes it more efficient. Efficient because it doesn't evaporate, it doesn't let the heat out.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like a little lid with, with a cutout for the cooker.

[Andy Inatko]

There's a topper.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And then there's a, A thing you can flip up and put the meat in and it's like. Yeah, this is easy to easy. It's an easy, nerdy thing. And you can start out with nothing but the cooker and just use your pot and then grow from there.

[Andy Inatko]

And the anovas start at like 30 bucks. Like, they're like there's 300 ones, there's an 80 ones or 65 ones that you just. It's like whether you have WI fi and how precise it is and how.

[Leo Laporte]

Powerful it is and how big the hinged lid. Collapsible 10.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I got that one. I got that one.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you need.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. The most important thing is. Yeah, you. And you don't need WI fi or Bluetooth or anything like that.

[Andy Inatko]

I really doesn't. I just turn the dial up and do the thing.

[Jason Snell]

I'm not gonna get gravy all over my phone just because I need to turn to turn off this.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Very nice. We'll come back to our picks of the week in just a moment. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Alex and Jim Jason.

[Alex Lindsay]

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[Andy Inatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Alex Lindsay]

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.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. 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.

[Andy Inatko]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Andy Inatko]

Per line via virtual prepaid card.

[Jason Snell]

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[Andy Inatko]

Apple iPhone 16, 128 gigabyte $829.99 Eligible.

[Jason Snell]

Trade in EG11 Pro for well qualified.

[Alex Lindsay]

Credits end and balance due.

[Andy Inatko]

If you pay off earlier, cancel contact T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's your turn, Alex.

[Andy Inatko]

So I spent the weekend in Golden Gate park, the Polo Fields.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did you go see the Grateful.

[Andy Inatko]

Dead tribute Dead and Company? Yeah, with. With John Mayer and I. I was. I was working there. So it's. Anyway, so were you still at it? Yeah, yeah. IMAX had it in 30 theaters and so cool. So anyway, so I was there all weekend and I had to go out and like. So I've never been to a Dead show. I mean, the Dead have been around for 60 years. I've been around for 55 years and. And I've avoided it until now. And I'm like, I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man.

[Andy Inatko]

I spent an hour in the middle of the. They. They. What they do is they do a. About a 75 minute. They did it three nights in a row. So they. And it's all different every time. That's. That's what I realized about the. The Dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

Is that no show is anywhere and no show is anything. Like. I. I was like, why do people keep on recording the show? Like, I don't understand. And then you go to it and you're like, oh, I got it. You know, and.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know, to be pharmaceutically enhanced as well.

[Andy Inatko]

I probably should have done more of that. So anyway, so the. But the.

[Leo Laporte]

You were working. You really could.

[Andy Inatko]

I was working.

[Alex Lindsay]

I could.

[Andy Inatko]

You know, so. So I. So I. And this is what the. You know, this is what the stage looked like really early on.

[Leo Laporte]

They were always big on the sound system.

[Andy Inatko]

It is out of control. So here. Now this is also being used for outside lands. But you can see. You know, this is. I'm kind of in the middle area there. You can see kind of. Let's see if I got. There's. There's some. Where they start turning the light. The light stuff on. And then look at. I mean, this is at night and beautiful.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just.

[Andy Inatko]

It's really insane. And then. Mickey.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you'd have better seats though, Alex, given your fact.

[Andy Inatko]

So here's the funny thing about that. I talked to a bunch of people who go to these all the time. You know, turns out a lot of people go to the Dead all The Dead shows ever. All the. And they said you can't experience it in the VIP section and you can't experience it in those tents. They said, you. What you want to do is get as close to the front of house mixer as possible because that's who's mixing the show. Yeah, so they said get close to that and be in the middle, but not in the back, but in the middle. They. You know, these people do it all the time. Especially when you talk to tech people.

[Jason Snell]

Who do it all the time.

[Andy Inatko]

They were like, this is where you stand. Right? So. So that. So where I am is. Right. I'm pretty close to where. As close as you can get comfortably to the. You know, to the front of house mixer. And it's a little further over, but not much. And anyway. But this is. This was incredible. They had. So Mickey Hart does this thing where he plays all these drums, and I guess it used to go on forever. And I'm. I'm pretty sure it works better if you're on a lot of pharmaceuticals.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You really don't notice how long it's taking.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't think. And all these particles. All these particles are coming. They have this. This program called Notch, and it's responding to his body, and so there's particle effects coming off of it. And he's using this big thing called the beam, which is like. It looks like a giant bass, you know, that's flat. And he plays it like a bass, like with a big thing. It was.

[Leo Laporte]

That was. That was made for him at Lucas Sound.

[Andy Inatko]

It was made by Sean House at. At. I know Sean. And Sean used to show everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

He showed me that thing.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, that's the beam. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Sean.

[Andy Inatko]

Sean House made the beam. He made about six or seven of them for Mickey. And. And so. And so Sean would show it to us, and he goes, but you have to see it in the show. You have to see it in the show.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this your first time seeing it in action?

[Andy Inatko]

That's the first time I ever saw it in action and the first time I ever saw anything that was related to the Dead. And I have to say, I was like, okay, I get it. I get. I went from. I have no idea what this is about to. I would go to every show. Like, I would go to every show and, man, do they make a lot of money on merch. That's all I gotta say. Like, they have that down pat. They have foil posters and all kinds of. And everyone feels like they have to buy everything if you want to see any of the show. If you want to see the show from the last weekend, and I would recommend Saturday or Sunday. I don't know if they're sold differently or not. They're streamed all through nuggs.nuggs.net and so Nuggs is there. They kind of grew up with the Dead, and so they stream a lot of things. It's a subscription. You can watch lots and lots of live shows. I think that what they started with is streaming lots of Fish and. And Dead shows. The one you're looking for, though, is somewhere in the middle of the Saturday set, a guy named Sturgill Simpson comes out and does Morning Dew, and he crushed it. And, I mean, I was just sitting there. I got chills listening to it. It was like. It was just so good anyway, so I didn't get it before. Obviously, I do get it now. And it was. Was. It's. I. I would highly recommend seeing them, but if you want to see concerts and you want to see that concert, I think you can buy it still on. And I think they did it in 4k from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. From nugs.nugs.net and the sound is probably very, very good. They really focus.

[Andy Inatko]

It's incredible, you know, quality. The other thing is Myers, which is the. You know, they're the ones that do the sound for the Dead. They grew up. I didn't real. We consider them the highest. They're out of Berkeley, and we consider Myer Audio to Myers Audio to. To be the highest quality audio you can get. And so what I didn't know is that they built that system, the original systems for the Grateful Dead, because it was so important to have great audio. The audio and the lighting and the show itself, and a lot of it has been pared down for the stage from the Sphere because they were doing something in the Sphere. And so it was also parts of the Sphere kit, which are these $250,000 camera systems on the front of the stage, which is part of what makes it. If you look at it, you'll go, how are they getting that shot? It's a riser. It's this camera riser that has what's called a Trinity rig on the top of it. And that Trinity rig by itself is $200,000 my brother has. And so. And so it's a very expensive. It's usually used on a Steadicam, and it's on these risers. And it's. It's a incredible setup. It was probably one of the best shows I've seen in, you know, a decade. So. Really. So I highly. I was glad. I, I didn't. I was. Saturday was a little off, not completely off. And so I was able to go out for about an hour, hour and a half and, and get the best part of the show. So it was good.

[Leo Laporte]

Good music.

[Andy Inatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Nugs.

[Andy Inatko]

Is it nugs.comnugs.net.

[Leo Laporte]

Net.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. You can watch it live.

[Andy Inatko]

And lots of other shows, too.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Is it, is it too much to ask that whoever has nugs.com is like a really, really uptight financial services company? Like really the.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it really?

[Jason Snell]

No, I'm saying.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh, that'd be funny. That'd be funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just check. Yeah, it's a premium domain available for.

[Andy Inatko]

Purchase, and they're probably asking nugs.net for like $100,000 or 50.

[Jason Snell]

I just want it to be like a ultra conservative think tank or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it that if I bought nugs.com it would establish instant trust and credibility with my customers. Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Andy Inatko]

If you're smelling. What you need to do is. What you should do is do nugs.com and sell weed. Like, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, it's obvious what it stands for. Yes. And credibility with my customers.

[Andy Inatko]

All the people going to nugs.net would accidentally go to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, that's it. That's right. Or sell the merch.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the, I'm sad to say, Vision Pro list version of the best Vision Pro podcast we'll.

[Alex Lindsay]

Get there in the world.

[Andy Inatko]

Next time we'll have more talk.

[Leo Laporte]

I looked for some stories and I couldn't.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can't have Vision Pro segment every week. That gives them what they want. You got to leave them wanting more.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. I'm sorry. You are watching, though. The best darn Mac podcast in the Apple podcast in the world. We do Mac break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. You can watch us live. Live in a variety of places. Now, if you're in the club, that's, you know, that's the behind the velvet rope access. You can watch us in the Club Twit Discord. Otherwise, the unwashed map. Oh, let's do a plug for Club twit. Why not? 10 bucks a month ad, free versions of all the shows. Access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang. In fact, we've got some fun stuff coming up. Stacy's book club is Friday. A wonderful sci fi book. Jason, again, you're invited. I know you really like this is how youw Win the Time War. Good one. Really good book. We'll also be doing Chris Margaret's photo segment immediately after. So we do a lot of content in the club only, including all of the keynotes and so forth are now in the club only. So that's another reason to join the club. But mostly you do it because you want to support the content we make here. At 25% of our operating costs are supported by club members. Without you, we'd have to cut back. I don't know what we'd do. So thank you to our club members. I love to have you in the club too. Twit tv Club Twit. Consider it. There's a two week free trial. There are in fact family plans and corporate plans as well. There's an annual plan too, which doesn't save you any money, but at least you don't get those monthly pings. Twit TV Club Twit. Thanks in advance for that. If you're not in the club, you can watch on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.comX and Kik.com and I think I must have left something out, but anyway, Twitch. I mentioned Twitch, Twitch TV as well, which means you can get the freshest version the day we record. But you don't have to because we do record it. It's a miracle of modern technology and you can watch it after the fact. We put a copy up on our website, of course. Twitch TV, MBD. There's a link there to the YouTube channel. Now that's a good thing to know about. If you want to share clips of any part of the show with friends and family, do that please, because it helps us promote the show. It really helps us grow the show. Also, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. There's audio and video. We do both. And it's free to subscribe, of course, but there is a toll. If you would give us a nice review that would make me very happy. Most podcast clients will let you do that. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you to Andy Inatko. Great to see you in the library. Thank you to Jason Snell, sixcolors.com, his [e-mail] Jason and of course, that kind of immediately after the quarterly results, call YouTube videos. Also in the front page of his website, sixcolors. Com, you can watch Dan Moran and and Snow.

[Alex Lindsay]

Break down.

[Leo Laporte]

Break it all down. Yeah, break down the charts, man. And of course, Alex Lindsay Officehours global. And if you want to do as Nugs did and hire the man 090.

[Andy Inatko]

Media Nugs didn't hire me. Someone else did.

[Leo Laporte]

Someone else hired me.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

But I worked for them. They're great. Great, great folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, all three of you. Thanks to everybody who's watching. But now it is my sad and solemn duty say get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next week. Bye Bye. No matter how much spare time you have, TWiT TV has the perfect tech news format for your schedule. Stay up to date with everything happening in tech and get tech news your way with TWiT TV. Start your week with this Week in Tech for an in depth, comprehensive dive into the top stories every week. And for a midweek boost post, Tech News Weekly brings you concise quick updates with the journalists breaking the news. Whether you need just the nuts and bolts or want the full analysis, stay informed with TWiT TV's perfect pairing of tech news programs.