MacBreak Weekly 985: Debasement Meter

Summary

MacBreak Weekly Episode 985: Debasement Meter – Detailed Summary

Release Date: August 13, 2025

In Episode 985 of MacBreak Weekly, host Leo Laporte, alongside co-hosts Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell, delves into a multitude of Apple-centric topics ranging from rumored product releases to Apple's evolving stance on artificial intelligence and regulatory challenges. The episode, aptly titled "Debasement Meter," assesses recent developments and their implications for Apple's product lineup and corporate strategy.

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1. Rumored Low-Cost MacBook

The episode kicks off with a significant focus on rumors surrounding a forthcoming low-cost MacBook. The panelists explore the possibility of Apple introducing a more affordable MacBook model powered by an A-series chip, aiming to compete directly with mid-range Windows notebooks.

• Alex Lindsay ([04:40]):

  "The idea of busting down the price from the traditional $999 like entry point for a portable Macintosh to something where it's more in the mid-range of a decent Windows notebook. That is super exciting."

• Andy Ihnatko ([05:26]):

  "A $599 would be an incredible price for just something for people who want a little bit more than an iPad."

Key Points:

• Chip Integration: Utilizing the A18 Pro chip from the iPhone 16 Pro, enabling Apple to reduce costs without significantly compromising performance.
• Price Point: Estimated between $599 and $699, making it accessible to a broader audience, including first-time Mac buyers and students.
• Design Considerations: Potential for colorful casing options (e.g., silver, pink, yellow) to distinguish it from higher-end MacBooks.
• Market Impact: Aims to attract users who prioritize affordability over the advanced features of the MacBook Air or Pro, potentially increasing Apple's ecosystem penetration.

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2. Delayed MacBook Pro with OLED Display

Following the discussion on the low-cost MacBook, the panel addresses delays in the anticipated MacBook Pro featuring an OLED screen.

• Leo Laporte ([35:03]):

  "Ming Chi Kuo said the same thing this week... It sounds now like spring of '26 or '27 instead of the fall of '24."

Key Points:

• Release Timeline: Expected production delays pushing the release to late 2026 or early 2027.
• Features Awaited: OLED display and other new functionalities anticipated to enhance user experience.
• Market Strategy: Delaying the Pro model allows Apple to focus on stabilizing production and integrating advanced technologies effectively.

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3. Apple's AI Strategy and Talent Migration

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Apple's endeavors in artificial intelligence (AI) and the challenges it faces in retaining top talent.

• Jason Snell ([44:00]):

  "Apple seems to really be figuring out what their AI strategy is and what they want."

• Andy Ihnatko ([44:40]):

  "Meta is going well... Apple has a different approach."

Key Points:

• Brain Drain: Notable exodus of AI professionals from Apple to competitors like Meta, indicating possible strategic misalignments.
• AI Integration: Apple is focusing on integrating AI into existing products rather than developing standalone AI units.
• Future Prospects: The talent shift could impact Apple's innovation trajectory in AI, though the company remains committed to its long-term vision.

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4. iOS 26 Updates: Liquid Glass and Translation Features

The panel explores the latest updates in iOS 26, highlighting new visual elements and functional enhancements.

• Leo Laporte ([55:48]):

  "The new toggle feels like clicking on breast implants to me, but that's just me."

• Andy Ihnatko ([57:02]):

  "It has to work all the time or it doesn't."

Key Points:

• Liquid Glass: A new visual metaphor introduced in iOS 26 aiming to enhance the interactive experience with dynamic, liquid-like interface elements.
• Translation for AirPods: An anticipated feature allowing real-time translation, though concerns persist about its reliability and accuracy.
• Camera App Redesign: Overhauled gestures and interface elements intended to improve usability, though met with mixed reactions due to metaphorical inconsistencies.

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5. Vision Pro Segment: Immersive Content Creation

Andy Ihnatko shares his experiences experimenting with the Apple Vision Pro, showcasing immersive content creation using advanced camera systems.

• Andy Ihnatko ([110:16]):

  "This is a game-changing machine. It's incredible."

Key Points:

• Blackmagic Immersive Camera: Utilization of a specialized camera system to capture 180° to 210° immersive video footage compatible with Vision Pro.
• Content Creation: Real-time previews and rapid rendering capabilities facilitate dynamic and engaging immersive experiences.
• Future Developments: Plans to develop dedicated channels for immersive content, emphasizing the potential for innovative storytelling and interactive media.

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6. Apple's Regulatory Challenges and Government Relations

A heated discussion unfolds around Apple's interactions with governmental bodies, focusing on tariff negotiations and regulatory compliance across different regions.

• Alex Lindsay ([69:55]):

  "The most single most embarrassing product that Apple has ever made out of gold was the solid gold Apple Watch. I can't believe that they've actually done something to actually exceed that."

• Jason Snell ([72:24]):

  "If you don't like his behavior, I guess what I would say is, is it Tim Cook or is it the fact that Apple is a gigantic corporation..."

Key Points:

• White House Appearance: Tim Cook's presentation of a gold bar to President Trump in exchange for tariff exemptions, raising concerns about corporate diplomacy and ethical boundaries.
• Global Regulations: Japan's impending requirement for third-party browsers on iPhones, echoing EU's App Store policies, complicates Apple's ecosystem control.
• Privacy and Security: Ongoing debates about Apple's stance on user privacy versus governmental demands for access, with fears about future compromises on encryption standards.

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7. Picks of the Week

Alex Lindsay: Logic Board Swap for iMac G4

• Description: A modification allowing the classic iMac G4 to function as an external display for modern computers, including added USB and audio capabilities.
• Price: Approximately $250, making it an accessible upgrade for enthusiasts seeking to repurpose vintage Apple hardware.

Jason Snell: Instapaper App

• Description: An enduring read-it-later service that remains independent and user-friendly. Recent collaboration with Kobo enables syncing articles directly to Kobo e-readers, enhancing the reading experience.
• Benefits: Free usage with an optional premium tier offering extended features and integration options.

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8. Community and Club TWiT Membership

The episode concludes with an invitation to listeners to join Club TWiT, offering benefits such as ad-free content, exclusive access to behind-the-scenes discussions, and participation in special events like game nights and book clubs.

• Leo Laporte ([135:00]):

  "Join the club. And we give you benefits ad-free versions of all the shows."

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Conclusion

Episode 985 of MacBreak Weekly offers an in-depth exploration of Apple's strategic moves amidst evolving market dynamics and regulatory landscapes. From the anticipation of a budget-friendly MacBook to the complexities of integrating AI and navigating governmental pressures, the panel provides insightful analysis backed by notable quotes and timestamped discussions. Additionally, segments on immersive content creation with Vision Pro and curated picks highlight the show's commitment to covering both current trends and innovative technologies. For listeners seeking a comprehensive understanding of Apple's trajectory in 2025, this episode serves as a valuable resource.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are here. We'll talk about the rumors. There are lots of them, including one for a low cost MacBook. Now, how much would you pay? There may be a delay in the MacBook Pro. I'm waiting for the one with the OLED screen and some new features in iOS 26. Hint at a translation feature for AirPods. That and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly. Episode 985, recorded Tuesday, August 12, 2025. Debasement meter. It's time for Mac Break Weekly. The latest Apple news brought to you hot and fresh like a microwave day old piece of pizza.

[Jason Snell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

With Jason Snell.

[Jason Snell]

I acknowledge your reference. We record this at 11am which means it's always lunchtime during Mac Break Weekly. And all of us have different strategies, except for Andy, who is fine. Andy, can we deal with it?

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like Andy and Nako might have a. I feel like it might have a plate of spaghetti and meatballs just to add a camera.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can I hang on one second?

[Leo Laporte]

Uh. Oh, he's gonna go get his lunch bag. Look at that nice pattern on the library chair.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, this is. I'm gonna show you a sign that. Appearing at the library about a month, two months ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, eating in the public library is not permitted.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

So I go. No sign is created unless there was an incident. That's what I learned.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's always.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, yeah, exactly. Well, exactly. Once I was working in the quiet room, like the closed room where you're supposed to be quiet. Someone was having a salad. A salad. But no covered drinks are allowed. So I bought. So I buy my Coke and then like outside the door, I decant it into my official relay fm.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Insulated bottle. But yeah, I used to. I used to have just. Okay, I'll have a normal breakfast. I'll delay lunch. I'll just like take a snack with me into the library. And now it's like I have to have a snack like at around noon now because I. I'm too busy wrapping things up to. I'm too busy wrapping things up in the office so I can leave to fix myself a nice lunch. But that's. That's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I always say that Coke is better in a decanter. You gotta let it breeze.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it's classy, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Also here, Alex Lindsay, office hours global. He's been up since, God knows, the crack of dawn. And as a, even pre dawn.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So As a result, 6am is technically mid morning in case you're, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Like dawn in this area was 6:23am.

[Jason Snell]

If we do move the show to 4:00am, I doing four office hours.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If I get up, if I get up and it's light, I'm like, I'm like, what happened? I slept through some alarm. I did something, I slept in. You know, if I see the sun when I get up, it's, it's a very unusual.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't get up till I see the sun. And that's my motto.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I like to see the sun come up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is much to talk about, but rather than starting with the gold bar that Tim Cook gave to the president, I'd like to. We'll get to that. Yeah, I think we have to. But I'd like to start with a rumor that this low cost MacBook is in process and coming soon to a desktop near you.

[Alex Lindsay]

I love that idea. So the rumor is that instead of using an M series chip, it'll use like an iPhone, A series chip, not directly out of an iPhone, but basically that technology and that that will in part allow them to make or will be in favor of their being able to make a MacBook. That's $599, $699, which would be. I. It's been a while since I've felt as though it's important to sort of ding Apple for being the company of hey, go be poor someplace else. Because I think they've done a really, really good job of expanding their line, particularly the iPad. Gives a lot of people who have lower income an opportunity to have an iPhone and an Apple quality productivity entertainment experience for as little as $300, that's great. But the idea of busting down the price from the traditional $999 like entry point for a portable Macintosh to something where it's more in the mid range of a decent Windows notebook. That is super exciting. The ability to bring your kids up into the Apple ecosystem without having to say, look, I mean, we can't buy you $1,000 laptop, you're 12 years old. But hey, this is kind of more practical given that you'll probably leave it on a bus sometime in the next.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Three years and the price would really make sense. And it kind of fits into that Mac Mini kind of look. And the reality is these chips have gotten powerful, that there's no reason why it can't do most of what the average person wants to do. That's the Thing is that nowadays these chips are way faster than most people need. So taking something that's relatively small and relatively inexpensive and the development costs have already been amortized, all that stuff makes it much easier for them to throw these chips and this system together. And I think that 599 would be a incredible price for just something for people to, you know, they want a little bit more than an iPad, but they're not ready to spend more than that. It's. It's a great idea.

[Jason Snell]

Or they're comfortable with a laptop. Right. That's the other thing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We.

[Jason Snell]

Last week we were talking about Apple's financials and talking about how many iPhone users there are who don't have whatever Apple watches, Macs, iPads. And you know, one reason why a lot of those iPhone users don't have Macs is because the iPhone is a priority for them. But the laptop, they're like, you know, I'll just get something. And you look at this price, that's not 999, and you think it's going to reach people. It's. No, it's not going to be as good as the MacBook Air, but that's not the point. It's going to reach people who otherwise would have just sort of said, yeah, you know, I'm not going to bother. It's too expensive. And I think that that's a really interesting new way for Apple. I do. I would bet that a lot of these people are going to be people who have existing Apple products, but the Mac was just kind of not a priority or out of reach, and they're going to be able to put it in reach. And that's because Apple Silicon is so good that you can take this, you know, beneath the basement of Apple Silicon and it's still a good laptop.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke says this should be called the Meh Pro Nobby.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, I mean, I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

How many, how many people, though, do you think buy an iPhone and say, I don't need a computer? Like, that's all.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's hard to really type a lot on a knife. I mean, you can. I mean, I can type pretty quick.

[Leo Laporte]

It's generational. Don't you think that there are maybe.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I feel like auto. The auto correction has gotten worse every year for the last two or three years.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like crazy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's just between. Sometimes it's not auto correcting at all and sometimes it's just making stuff up.

[Leo Laporte]

So I almost always misunderstands what I'm trying to type.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So I've gotten. The funny thing is the dictation works way better. So I find myself talking to my phone all the time because it's better than my typing.

[Leo Laporte]

Get ready. Because there's a bug. I don't know if I was the first to discover it, but there is a bug. In iOS 26 I was doing voice dictation and talking with Anthony and this is what showed up in my messages. I think that's, I think that's hangal but I, but it's the same thing over and over again. And by the way, if I didn't stop it, it would have kept going. So that's a little text to speech or speech.

[Jason Snell]

My kids obviously of the phone and iPad generation and they have laptops and I think the difference is they don't use them. I consider my computer sort of a primary medium. I go to it for certain things. I think a lot of people of older ages do that, but I think people of younger ages still see the computer as a valuable place even if it's not where they live. I think my daughter lives on her phone but uses her computer for a bunch of stuff. But when that priority is shifted, you get a lot of people who will be happy to pay for an iPhone every few years, but they look at a thousand dollar Mac laptop and they think and so if you can it down lower you are, you know, you're going to reach that audience that maybe is curious or interested. And we've already seen that like with some of the incentives that happened in China in the last quarter they said they sold a lot of Macs and those are two first time buyers and those are people who like obviously I think have iPhones and we're always going to consider the Mac and now they have an opportunity. And this, it's a. And I think Apple, I got to say I think Apple probably has gotten some very good data out of those Walmart sales and also some discounts at Costco where they're like really getting the sense that there is a, it's not undercutting their market. It's like a newer market that has aspired to get more Apple products but never been, never been on the radar.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And you look at like fleet, you know, for fleets, this is going to be a big deal. Like a big corporation is making decisions like 999 is too much for the marketing staff or too much for the assistants or too much for whatever and they're buying them these, you know, these PCs that are 600, 700, $800 that are that are just below what's there. And you have marketing folks that have trouble with the PC sometimes. And so the thing is, I think you could end up selling thousands of these to companies that just now can have because the higher end marketing teams that we work with at least are all Mac. And so I think that you would end up with a lot more support in that lower area. So it's really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's where the rumor started in June. Ming Chee. It came from essentially the supply chain. So Ming Chi Kuo said that Apple will go into production in late 2025 or early 26 on a new MacBook model that'll be powered by the A18 Pro chip. That's what's in the iPhone 16 Pro. The machine may feature colorful casing options including silver, pink and yellow. Lisa's all into hot pink these days, so maybe you'd like a hot pink MacBook, huh? Even the M1 MacBook Air. Oh, wait a minute, here it is. This is from Digitime. So this is the update. And Digitimes is another supply chain rumor mill, usually pretty reliable. It's actually not a rumor mill. It's a real life publication. Apple is preparing to shake up the notebook market with an all new Ultra Low Cost MacBook. According to supply chain sources, some components are expected to enter mass production by the end of the third quarter. That's soon. 2025. What's that? That's October. End of the third quarter would be September. A schedule that could see the full system assembly beginning before the end of the year.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Gurman says keeps saying it could be this year or next year. I would say probably next year, but you never know. It could be late this year before the holidays. Actually Leo, you know, the story goes further back in 2023. In September, Digitimes did a report about Apple. You know, competing with Chromebooks was the way they framed it. But again you're ascribing strategy to some supply chain sources. But it was very clear that what they were talking about was what it turns out is this thing like. So they had that in 23 that Apple was experimenting with a low cost MacBook. And then it came into focus this year with this idea that the, the A18 Pro would be, would be powering it. So this has been something that has been kind of like on the radar for a while, but I think a lot of people missed it in 23 because the way it was phrased was like, oh, it's going to be a Chromebook. And everybody looked at that. And was like, what. That doesn't make any sense. But this is actually what it was is. It's a, It's a Walmart MacBook Air. It turned into a whole product.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I wonder if that will be reflected in the trade dress. Like if they're going to say if this is. We're definitely not going to be getting boardroom professionals buying this unless it's like a fleet device. Why not have the, have a, have a red one? Why not have a purple one? Not have. Why not extend some of the iPhone colorways into this product? I'm even, even less leaves me wondering if they'll go for something other than the usual like burnished aluminum enclosure and just make it into something that's super, super distinctive. That would not. I think that, I don't think it'll be a problem in trying to avoid siphoning sales away from the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air. But I think there are a lot of advantages to making this really visually distinctive. That this is an absolutely separate product. Do not imply, do not expect to be able to do everything with this $599 MacBook that you can do with even $1,000 MacBook Pro. It's an M1 versus.

[Jason Snell]

Versus.

[Leo Laporte]

An A series chip would really be so much worse. I think maybe we're being a little snobby. I think it might be just fine.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, I don't, I don't think so either. I think it's a good entry level.

[Leo Laporte]

8 gigs of RAM enough.

[Jason Snell]

I think it might be more because I think it'll have, it'll probably have Apple intelligence, but, but I mean it will be less nice. I think the idea, the sweet spot for Apple is to make something that is good. I don't think it will be plastic because I think it would be a hard sell for Apple to make even mid range computers at this point. And the initial, the very, the Uber. The rumor in 23 even said that it was going to be metal. So it will be. But they'll, I mean they're going to cut corners in ways to make it so that a lot of people who look at it will go, nah, I'm just going to get the MacBook Air and that's all they want. But then other people will be like this is enough. Because the fact is like it won't have Thunderbolt. Well, the people who buy this laptop aren't going to care. It's going to have a little bit smaller screen. The rumor, I think this might have been Ming Chi Kuo this week said 12.9. So sort of like one of those earlier iPad screens. It's a 12.9-inch screen because the current MacBook Air is a 13.6, something like that, 13.4. So it'll be smaller, it'll have a different shape, it'll have slower processor, slower memory. Yeah, it will be a perfectly good computer. But it will definitely, I think be clearly not as good as the MacBook Air. And that's what you want is you want it to be usable. 1 and 2 have the air have a clear difference so that people buy the Air.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it's only one USB C at least according to the rumor. And so the, the yeah, because you.

[Leo Laporte]

Have to make some artificial distinctions.

[Jason Snell]

Well an iPhone chip, that's not artificial.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the limitation of the chip.

[Jason Snell]

Of an iPhone chip.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah. So I think that there's, I mean I think that they. It's going to have natural limitations to it that would, is what you do to bring the price down.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have to say I bought my daughter who prefers chromebooks. The new Chromebook plus from Samsung for 650 has a pretty competent media tech chip in it does AI, 16 gigs of RAM, OLED screen. So that's the, that's the competition.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well also the competition might get a little bit, a little bit more spicy in the next couple of years as Google, Google is, they haven't really said what they plan to do with Android and Chrome OS yet, but they are building both of them. They're building Chrome OS on top of Android resources.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they've implied they're basically going to move to Android and Android os. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they're also making it very, very clear that and they want Android to be a really good desktop OS as well. Next generation of phones that and even some current generation premium Android phones that will run that run the next, the next operating system or excuse me, updates to the current operating system. You will be able to plug it into an external screen and get like a desktop environment that runs with it Already developers have access to a VM environment that you can install GUI based Linux into. So maybe there and in addition to all the other good reasons, there's also the reason why what if it's suddenly possible for people to buy a very nice $500 desktop like experience Android notebook And what would that do to iPad sales? What would that do to a MA Air sales?

[Leo Laporte]

So you think this is defensive?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I think, I think it's just a good idea all around. I mean one of the things we haven't talked about is that Apple at almost all the quarterlies, they keep mentioning about the numbers of the people who buy an Apple product tend to buy other Apple products either they tend to keep those customers and those customers tend to buy lots more stuff in the future. So this is also a really good gateway drug to someone who says, well you know what, I don't really, I've never really been terrible. I've never been attracted enough about the iPhone to like buy one. I've just always had an Android phone. But gee, now that I have my notebook and I'm really happy with it, maybe I will buy an iPhone because it will work with it with continuity. And so, well, now that I have an iPhone, maybe I will buy an Apple watch or maybe my next desktop will be a Mac mini. So I think there are a lot of really good reasons for this to exist.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I mean Apple historically has in fact, if anything the Mac has been behind on this where they've historically slowly filled out the entire range so that they keep on going down, you know, downstream. And I think that they weren't able to do that with Intel's. But this thing is probably going to be at least as powerful as the last intel air, you know, like that was out there. So, so this is going to be a very service. Well, but it's, I think it's going to be a very serviceable computer for the average person who's doing, you know, that's not trying to do a bunch of. I bet you it will still do some audio and video and stuff like that. But it's going to, but what I did was going to be great.

[Jason Snell]

When this rumor hit, I pulled up all the benchmark numbers, right? And it's in some cases as fast as the M1 and in other cases a bit faster than the M1.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

And even today the M1 is fine. It's perfectly fine. Again, it's not going to be for everybody. But to get that power in a product that costs 600 bucks, that's pretty good. And that's why I keep coming back to saying this is all because of Apple silicon, because it used to be Apple drew a line somewhere, somewhere because below that they thought the quality is just not going to be good enough. And in fact you could argue that when they made that little tiny 12 inch MacBook on that really compromised intel processor, they learned a lesson because it kind of wasn't good enough and it was expensive instead of cheap. And but with Apple silicon, like the bar that they used to set is like it's way above what a lot of people need. So it gives them the latitude to go down and use an iPad, an iPhone chip. And I think it's, I think it's really smart and I think they're going to get a lot of benefit out of it. But I think the root of it is Apple silicon is so efficient that they can now make a perfectly good computer. That's not, that is. Yeah, that is M1ish speed or if not a little faster for some tasks for 600 bucks. That's pretty great.

[Alex Lindsay]

Here's one, here's one question that occurs to me though. If it is a 12.9 inch screen, realize that they do make like MacBooks with 12.9 inch screens and they make iPads with 12.9 inch screens that have different aspect ratios. Do you think it'll have an iPad aspect ratio where it's taller compared to the MacBooks or do you think they'll go for like the widescreen aspect ratio?

[Jason Snell]

That's a good question. I mean, I don't know enough about the parts that are. It's an interesting idea. Like they use like it used to be, you used to have taller laptops. It creates more, you know, distance in the keyboard and then it might be a little less compact. The cynical part of me says what part is cheaper?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

What parts are available?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look at Samsung making these OLED screens in their Chromebooks for 650 bucks. Clearly you can put a good screen.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but I mean, actually you wouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Want to put an OLED in this because it would make too many people want it.

[Jason Snell]

No, but I think Apple will put a screen in it that is, that they think is good enough, but maybe isn't. Again, isn't what they pay for for a MacBook Air. It's a little down from that and they save money there. And they also allow some different. Maybe the color gamut isn't as broad and Right. Like there are going to be some details that allow them to say and it's a little smaller and you know that's, that's going to be part of the story.

[Alex Lindsay]

There are a lot of Mac users who don't edit video, don't do photos, they don't run LLMs, they just do the reading. Right. And arithmetic on it.

[Jason Snell]

Even though they don't download third party apps.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right, exactly right. Yeah. They're writing papers, writing whatever, surfing the web.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's another interesting question. Do you think maybe even out of simplicity, marketing or spite, they'd say, oh, by the way, this version of the MacBook cannot run apps that are outside of the App Store. I don't see lockdown.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I don't see it.

[Alex Lindsay]

You need the terminal, for instance, to make it into a Mac and you control it.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, that's the thing is if this is going to be going into fleets or schools or wherever, those will be locked down by choice by the IT managers. Right. But I don't think Apple, I mean Microsoft just abandoned. They're going to say Windows, that doesn't do this. Yeah, it's not worth it. It's not worth it. And I think it, it calls into question what the definition of a Mac is. And I don't think Apple wants to do that. I think Apple will tinker around the edges with warning you about running unauthorized software and stuff like that. But I don't think Apple wants to mess with the Mac and like how it definitively can run software from places and say, well, this Mac runs software, except for that other software is not a game I think they want to play.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So you've looked at what the A18 Pro can do compared to the M series chips. I think it's interesting that you could only have one USB port. What are other limitations?

[Jason Snell]

It's not 100%. There's some thought that you might be able to do two. I think my gut feeling is either you do two USB ports and you charge off USB or you do one USB port and you charge off mag safe. And the question is, what are they going to do? But it wouldn't, it wouldn't shock me if they're two USBs and then they want to use one of them to charge.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

Whatever's cheaper. I don't know about that. But like, yeah, in the bottom line is like the, the A16 or A18 Pro is way faster than the M1 at single core performance. Right. It's got a in a geekbench score. It's faster than the M3, it's a little slower than the M4 because the M4 has more cores, but it's faster than the M3. And the fact is a lot of general use, basic use of computers is mostly single core. Right. It's not super. The multi core happens when you push it. So in general use, when you're not pushing it, it could be as responsive as an M3 or almost an M4. When you look at multi core because of the way that it's architected, its performance is more like the M1. But again, the M1 performance, it's not going to blow your socks off, but like, for a regular person, it's just fine. And similarly, the metal score, it's got a little bit of a better GPU than is in the M1, but not as good as the M2.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm looking at your graphs. You wrote a whole article on this at Six Colors Calm. I'm pretty impressed with the performance. I mean, it is right in there. This is my position, is that so Apple's needs to make a distinction so that people will buy the more expensive laptop. But, but honestly, this may be a perfectly good laptop for most people buying Apple laptops.

[Jason Snell]

And honestly, it's okay. People are like, oh, they're gonna lose all the other sales that are higher up. It's like, you know what a lot of Apple buying is, what do I need? And then how nice do I want it to be?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What's the top Apple laptop? It's the Air. Right. It's not their most expensive model.

[Jason Snell]

Right. It's the most successful. And then they sell. They make a lot of money selling pros to people who want more and they want it to be nicer. But you know, you've got a spectrum there. So I think, I think they have standards. I don't think it's going to be a crappy laptop, but I think they will make it so that there are reasons why you might want a MacBook Air. And that's fine. But like, that's why I say the bar has lowered. Not because Apple standards have lowered, but because Apple silicon is so good. They can lower the bar and make a computer that is still, like I said, it's in tough tasks, it's an M1. In normal tasks, it's almost an M4. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Single core, which is what Most people do 99% of the time you're not doing multi core. That's. The green bar is right in there. The only thing that's faster is the M4 MacBook Air.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And if you're, if you're not doing AV work, this is going to do 99% of what you want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is mostly just face it, browsing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Using your mess, what 90% of the audience will do and mail Safari, maybe pages.

[Alex Lindsay]

And as usual, Docs, as the resident cheapskate on this panel, I'm still using an M1 MacBook. I use final Cut on it. I use Photoshop on it. I'm not a professional any of these things, but I've never had a moment where I've realized that, oh my God, I wish I could run this on this MacBook. That just simply has never happened.

[Leo Laporte]

And the other point in doing this, as you have mentioned before, Jason, is you're moving to the next generation iPhone. You might have some A18 pros lying around, maybe some binned ones that you couldn't put in the phone.

[Jason Snell]

It's true. And also volume, right? I mean, the iPhone is the highest volume product Apple makes. They're making a lot of these chips, so why not put them in other systems? Because, you know, the more of them you make, the cheaper they are to make. So it helps with the margins to have this going into this product too.

[Leo Laporte]

No Thunderbolt, but does anybody. Would that really, Right. Make a difference?

[Jason Snell]

A little. Like when it used to be, there was a little while there where the M1 M2 MacBook Airs didn't do multiple monitors. And like, I understand why people were mad about not doing multiple external monitors, but there was an answer to it, which is, if you need that Edge case, buy a MacBook Pro, right? Like, I know you're going to have to spend more money, but you can get there. I think with Thunderbolt, it's a great example. It's like if you need Thunderbolt, buy a MacBook Air, right. It's not a hard thing. Like you, you are asking for a use case that esoteric enough that probably it's okay to say spend a little more money to get that esoteric feature.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Also, if the price is 30% less or even 40% less, that solves a lot of arguments. Like if they were just, oh, for $100 less, you can get one, get a MacBook that can do maybe half as much, then there's no reason for this to exist. But for 30% off, 40% off, any reasonable person would say, okay, I get it. I get the reason why I'm willing to give that up. Up to get, to get. To have AirPods Pro in addition to the Apple Watch, in addition to this package I'm getting, I'll, I'll go for it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And I do, I mean, I think sometimes last. Looking at the results last week really made me think a lot about the undiscovered territory for Apple in terms of its products and the idea that they've sold so many iPhones. And when they say things like half of the Apple Watch buyers were new to Apple Watch or half the Mac buyers in China were new to Mac or whatever that stat was, that's because there are so many people who have an iPhone and nothing else, or just an iPhone and an Apple watch. And those are all potential Mac buyers. All of them are. If you can put the right product in front of them. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And you're. You're looking at this huge population of students that are coming out and 87% are iPhone users right now. You know, that's a lot of. A lot of kids going to college. It's good.

[Jason Snell]

College also good. Let's not forget the good, better, best, classic marketing approach, which is. So now your kids go into college, they love their iPhone, they've been using a Mac at home, maybe, or a Chromebook at school and a Mac at home a little bit, whatever. And you're like, oh, now there's a $600 MacBook. Let's go look at it. Let's take it seriously. And then you look at it and the air and you go, I'm going to get the air. Right? Having that the product that gets you in the door, it may not be the product you want, but it got you in the door. And that's really effective marketing. And also, I would say, I don't think it's fooling people. I think it's. You want to them to consider you. I had an old boss who was a sales guy. He always said, you must be considered to be bought. It's like the low price gets you in the door and makes you start thinking about the Mac. And then maybe you choose a different Mac and that's okay. Apple. Apple's happy to sell you whatever you want to buy.

[Leo Laporte]

That is. That is one of the Freakonomics principles, isn't it? That you have three price points. Yeah, the low one, that's good, better, best, Right. But no one will ever buy. And then the next one up, which people say, well, for a little bit more, I could get this much more. And that's the one people end up buying.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And you run a lot all your marketing against the. Or a lot of your marketing against the low cost one.

[Jason Snell]

Starting at 699.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Just get them in the door, kids. We'll figure it out from there.

[Jason Snell]

When Apple was selling the M2 and the M3 MacBook Air, that's what they did, right? They said the MacBook Air starts at 899 or 999, I guess. What was the M2? And the M3 was 1099. Something like that. Right. It's like, well, yeah, you list the lowest price. That's how you do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Same thing with the iPad. They don't do that with the iPhone so much. I think they don't need to with the iPad.

[Jason Snell]

I'm glad you mentioned the iPad, too, because this is a similar strategy to what they've done with the iPad. The iPad mini uses an A17 processor in it and, like, it's fine. It does all the stuff. They're just using an iPhone processor in it for reasons, but, like, it's perfectly suitable and it allows them to make that product. So I think Apple is becoming increasingly comfortable. Like, the M project was obviously like, can we do this? Can we put an Apple silicon chip in a Mac? And they're like, well, we're going to need to make a special chip for it, and it's going to need to have these things that they based it on kind of those special versions that they did for the iPad Pro of the A series, those X chips and the Z chips. But now we're five. We're getting toward five generations in. And I think they're just way more comfortable with the idea that there is a spectrum of Apple chips that have different performance characteristics. And it's not this, like, oh, no, the M's are over here and the A's are over here. They're clearly over. And I think for good reason, because they don't need to. They don't need to say, if it doesn't start with an M, it can't be in a Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, we're going to take a little time out. There is disappointing news for me because I've been holding out. I've been saying, I will not buy another MacBook until. And, well, I'll have the details for you in just a minute. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy and Iko in the library where he is not allowed to eat. Don't even think of it, Andy. Jason Snell in his garage where he's not only allowed to eat, but will.

[Jason Snell]

It's how I stay alive out here in the middle of the day, taking.

[Alex Lindsay]

The cheese out of the traps.

[Leo Laporte]

And Alex Lindsay, who. I don't know where he stands on that particular matter, but gazpacho. Gazpacho, you just throw it in a.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Mug and drink it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yum, yum, yum. Nothing like it. Delish. Our show today brought to you. I was talking earlier about my. I got a. My sleep score has been slowly going up. And it's interesting because I've had different sleep strategies, and I owe it all to our new mattress. This week, our show brought to you by Helix Sleep. Your mattress is pretty important in your life. It's more than just the place you go to sleep. It's the place you go to cuddle with your partner on movie nights. Right? Netflix and Chill. Where do you do that on your mattress? Cuddle with your little kitty cat or doggy on your mattress. You wind down after a long day. Maybe you read a good book. One of my favorite things to do on my mattress. Curl up with a great book. Turns out your mattress is at the center of it all in more than eight hours a day. Maybe you're but a bad mattress. We knew that it was time to get a new mattress because we were waking up sweating and back was aching. And I looked it up and it said, yeah, you should get a new mattress every six to 10 years. And we were at eight. I said, yeah, I think maybe it's time to get a new mattress. You feel every. You know, I think the final straw was when I wake up, woke up, there's an earthquake. And then I realized it was just the cat jumping on the bed. If you feel every toss and turn your partner's making, you've got a classic mattress nightmare. Helix Sleep changes everything. And I can vouch for it because we are sleeping on a Helix sleep and I love it. And we got the topper as well, which gives you a nice cool evening. I love it. No more night sweats. Support is incredible. No back pain, no motion transfer, no earthquakes in the middle of the night. Get the deep sleep you deserve. It all starts at the Helix website, helixsleep.com Twitter. Take the quiz. That's what we did. We took the Helix Sleep quiz to figure out what kinds of sleepers we were. If you're a side sleeper, a stomach sleeper, back sleeper, you have one person in bed with you. 2. Do you have a pet. All of these things really help you determine. And Helix Sleep offers a huge variety of mattresses to fit exactly your style. The other thing we did is we looked at these reviews. Look at this. From Dr. Huberman and a doctor of sleep medicine. But then also the reviews from buyers. One recent review said buyer gave it five stars. I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. And then the other thing that convinced us was the awards. Helix Sleep time and time again as the most awarded mattress brand. Wired's Best Mattress of 2025 Good Housekeeping's Bedding Awards 2025 for Premium Plus Size Support GQ Sleep Awards 2025 Best Hybrid Mattress Wirecutter the New York Times wirecutter awards again 2025 featured for plus size Oprah the Daily Sleep Awards for 2025 best hotel like feel go to helixsleep.com twit for 20% off sitewide during the Labor Day sale early access that's helixsleep.com twit 20% off site wide. This offer ends on August 14th soon. So make sure you enter our show name after checkout. That way they'll know you you got it here. And if you're listening after the sale ends, don't worry that they always have something going on. Check it out. Helixsleep.com Twitter IT thank you Helix Sleep I can't wait to get in bed again, come to think of it. All right. So I have been, I told myself, and it's more as a way of tying, you know, tying myself to the mast than anything else. I'm not going to buy another MacBook. I happy happy with my MacBook M3 Max MacBook Pro. I'm not going to buy another one until they have an OLED screen. Well, now Mark Gurman says not so fast. Might be 2027 until that newly redesigned MacBook Pro. In fact, Gurman is saying the M5 MacBook Pro that we thought might come out in the next couple of months probably will be early next year.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, Ming Chi Kuo said the same thing this week.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Okay, I could still wait.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Wait.

[Leo Laporte]

I can still wait. This would be the complete redesign. Right. This isn't just a new screen.

[Jason Snell]

It'll be a complete turnover like they did a while ago, where they changed everything and the body is different and it's not just the screen, but it's the whole thing. But he had been saying that it was probably happening in 26, and it sounds now like, I don't know if it's like a full year delay or if what's happened is spring, maybe they like to do it. You know, they've done a bunch of MacBook Pro drops in the fall, and it sounds like this year that MacBook drop in the fall is not going to happen. And it's going to happen in the spring. And if you do that, and I wonder if that might mean that the M5 itself is pushed off. We'll see. But if that's the case, then it's not a big change. If, if it's he didn't say this, but like, it could be spring of 26 or 27 instead of spring of fall of 24.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they'll start doing spring releases or WWE releases and then, and then they.

[Jason Snell]

Catch up because we also had that with the, what was it, the M2 and the M3 in the same year. Ye so happens, even if you're on an annual cycle, sometimes they kind of slide around. You could do the MacBook Air earlier if you wanted to. They've been doing it later, but they could do it earlier and that would be fine too. Like it's sort of, I get the feeling that a lot of this has to do with what parts are available, where the chip yields are. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes in because remember, Apple doesn't just make a thing, they make the whole widget. So like if one part is trending in a different way, whether, like whether it's the OLED screen tech or it' or the M6 or whatever it is that all can affect their roadmap.

[Leo Laporte]

And it would be the M6 presumably. And it's reasonable to say this is, in my mind, I have an M3, wait two generations before the next one. Does that seem reasonable? I don't know. It'd be a 2 nanometer process, I would guess.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I tend to wait until I really feel like there's something there that I need.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a good point. I don't absolutely need it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There's a lot of things that, you know, I haven't needed to get a new Mac and then recently I have to get.

[Leo Laporte]

But I have to say the reason then is for the OLED screen because that knocks me out. I, I, my best screen is that iPad Pro with the OLED screen. It's just spectacular.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, so, so Gurman's report specifically says between the end of 26 and early 27. So it really is more about going, wrapping around the calendar and not a year long delay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And he thinks that's the M6 generation that goes in there and that's what they're targeting. So there'll be an M5 Pro that will come out either this fall or maybe in this, in the spring or in the winter of early next year. That will be the last of what exactly is this generation of hardware? And then there'll be a new one that's a little bit different and that one will have the OLED screen. So I think you can manage until then, Leo. I think you can.

[Leo Laporte]

I am not suffering. I do have that Mac Mini which I really like.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean my only real problem with my M1 MacBook is I'm running out of, out of places to put stickers and that's a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah. Once you, once you fill it up, you gotta get a new laptop.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. As far as. That's why I keep telling my accountant.

[Jason Snell]

But that's why Apple keeps sending Andy stickers. Yes.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The stickers have suddenly gotten bigger.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. So, you know, that's all right. I don't want to spend the money anyway. And I was glad I got this Mini, though, especially because of local AI models.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Now which Mini did you get now? The M4.

[Jason Snell]

A little teeny tiny mini.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I got Ram 4 Pro. The Pro. Whatever the setup was.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Of the teeny tiny mini.

[Leo Laporte]

64 gigs of RAM.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, I always try to future buy a little bit.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's such a great. I mean, the M4, the i7 Mini is transformational. Like, it is such. It's so much power. We talk about it all the time. Production. That it is so much power in such a small little case. It's amazing. You know, I think that, you know, I'm only using. I'm, I've been testing the base unit because I needed to use it for something where we have to buy potentially hundreds of them. So I was like, I think I'll just start with the little one. Like, let's not get, let's not get spoiled, you know. And it is. I'm just always amazed at what we can get done with it. It's really, really good little piece.

[Jason Snell]

It's another. I would put it in the list of what gets unlocked by Apple Silicon as well. Like, it's, it's. When you move to these processors and their origins in mo, you do stuff like shrink that case. We've been talking about the Mac Mini getting smaller. I've been writing about it for like a decade, and they finally did it. And I think the thing that pushed them over the edge more than anything else was just like Apple Silicon means they don't, they just don't need that space anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm in love with it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We've, we've. I've probably bought, I don't know, 50, 50 to 100 Mac minis in the last 15 years. And they, I have the very early ones, the middle ones. I've got one sitting over here that have CD ROMs in them. And, and the M1 was just. It went from being glue to being an actual production machine. You know, that's the, that's the big thing that changed.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, you know, Jason, you recommended this and I, and I got it. The little aluminum cheese grater.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I got one of those too.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it great.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't come with wheels. That's. Those 400 wheels are really missing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're only 300 for the little one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But see what they did, which is smart that the air comes out of here. And now there's an actual button that's the bottom on the side so I can turn it on. Like I would want to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I. I take that on on site with me when I'm doing Stu that sees it go, what is that? You know, like, I'm like, so cute. And they're like, oh, my gosh.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, that's a hidden feature of the Mac Mini design. Like, historically, you can only. You can almost think of it as just a Mac cartridge that you can just put into a slot. Whether it's because you want something with extra ports or you want something that looks nicer or just like you want to go the Alex route and just basically create like this HAL 9000 hallway of just racks and racks.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The only thing I would say is that a little bit of a bummer of the new Mac Minis is that they don't fit easily into a 1U system or a 2U. Like, there's not. They. They made them an uncomfortable size where they're a little bit more than 2U. They're like. Or 1U. They're a little bit less. You know, there's not any easy way to stack them. The old Mac Minis, I feel like they must have designed it this way. Was exactly the right height to put it into a 1U. So you could put two of them next to each other. So we would just have racks of these that were usually like processing video scopes or audio scopes or delivering something like that on. On site. And it was just really useful. And now it's just harder to rack. They're not as easy to rack as they.

[Jason Snell]

They were.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Apple doesn't really care if you rack.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, I don't know. I still feel like the early ones, someone might have thought of that because they're just perfect.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like, it's not.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's not like when they work absolutely perfectly into a rack mount, you wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the. Just in case you're interested, the aluminum chassis stand. This is from Tiga. Tiga. This is what you recommended, Jason.

[Jason Snell]

No, I think that was Andy, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, was it Andy?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it might have been me.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was only 50 bucks. Yeah, I think that's the best accessory for your adorable. Yeah, it's some Chinese company makes these aluminum.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there, somebody should do, you know, I don't know, have it be an R2D2 or I mean you can put it, they're so small. You could just sort of stick it in anything.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's, I will say it's nice. It does feel like it protects it a little bit and you, you love them but being able to, when I want to grab it, just hooking on just you know a little, little thing on the top to grab.

[Alex Lindsay]

You put a shoulder attached to a shoulder strap.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I could make it a purse.

[Leo Laporte]

This would go great with the new Vision Pro that attached Mac you'd be set, just carry it on your hip.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, this is, I mean these are those reminders. When we went into this in 2020 with the Apple Silicon era, I remember all the trepidation we had and it was like, I don't know, what does this mean? Can they do the high end? Can they really bring performance from out of a phone based system that they've been building on for the iPhone over the years? And what's really fun now is that we're starting to see like we talked about with that low cost laptop and with that tiny Mac Mini, like these are all of the interesting and unexpected spinoffs of the fact that they did that five years ago that like they're still generating interesting products just on the ramifications of having switched to this chip technology. And it's, it's a lot of fun whether whether that's a, a low end iPad or a low end laptop or it's something like this teeny tiny Mac mini. I love that we live in this, in this particular look there are a lot of things about this particular parallel universe that I don't love but the Apple Silicon stuff is good.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

AI, let's talk about AI. Apple, as we have been talking about over the last few weeks, has been suffering a bit of a brain drain to meta.

[Jason Snell]

Mark Gurman got the phone directory for the AI group and just calls everybody every day. Are you still there?

[Leo Laporte]

You still there? Is that really what he's doing or is he, I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

I mean he's obviously got a connection who's detailing the people who are leaving. Because he's literally writing a news story every time somebody leaves Apple to go to meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Should that matter? Does that mean it's going to be hard for them to go forward?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it implies slightly that it's going to be harder for them to attract talent. If people are actively leaving Apple to go elsewhere, recruiters might have a problem going after the top people or the people that Apple necessarily needs. It shows one of the reasons why there was a town hall last week where you'd basically have to get people to please don't abandon ship. We're doing great things. We promise you that AI is not going to be just a dalliance and it's not going to be something that we're just going to buy. We're going to buy an outside company and make them our AI unit. It, I don't, I mean it's, it's not a disaster poll for, for, for Apple that people are leaving, but it does indicate that of all of the, of all of the hotness of the employment market, Apple is not considered to be a great place to an attractive place to go. Unless you want to be working on consumer items.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You have to have money or vision. And so the thing is, is that like some ones, whether it's or both but, but you know, Meta is going well. We've got all that, we're going to spend all the money on it. You have anthropic and, and OpenAI trying to keep a little bit mission. We're trying to get something done. You may not get paid as much as you would at Meta, but you know, it's a, you also won't be.

[Alex Lindsay]

Part of the new apoplectic apocalypse of AI working for an evil. Evil. Evil.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Actually OpenAI has managed to keep some of its best talent even in the face of literally billion dollar offers. So it isn't just money, it's also.

[Jason Snell]

Some of these Apple model people are, are going to the super intelligence team at Meta and. Right. I think there's a mismatch there. Right. I think Apple's goals in AI are maybe not at all what Meta schools are. And so, you know, some of this is a brain drain. Sure. It may also be like a sorting out of objectives and specialties.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And that's okay. Like I don't want to harp too much on the fact that Apple's models team kind of let the company down because it's more complicated than that. But I would say that Apple seems to really be figuring out what their AI strategy is and what they want. And I think there are people, people who are a good fit for Apple and there are probably people who are a bad fit for Apple and a better fit for Meta. And so, you know, does it hurt them? I think it probably does, but I think there's also some aspects of this where it's a misalignment.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And part of it is that like there are AI is an area in which, if you're an engineer or a researcher, this is a world in which there are superstars and who does not want to fight alongside Captain America? And when Captain America. America switches to a different side, you kind of wish you were switching sides with Captain America. You don't want to be necessarily working for Hawkeye, let's say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And I think, I think again, Apple just has to have some kind of vision. And I think that, I think that they're not clear of that. We're not clear. But it doesn't sound like anybody at Apple's clear of it yet. But I think that also I think they have time from a consumer perspective. I think they got a little over their skis on this whole, like how do we give the average person something? But I've really been thinking about like where would I Apple put. Could put energy into something that would really make a, a significant difference right now that isn't. It's kind of low hanging fruit. One is just building, you know, one of the things a lot of companies are starting to do is build tons and tons of documentation to develop, you know, for developers, you know, so that the AI has lots of documentation that may not make sense to a human being or maybe too much for a human being, but it's great for the AI to look at, to make decisions. And so making sure that Xcode is able to jump between different models or different services easily and making sure it's got tons and tons of documentation that's, that's good for AI makes a difference because it just makes it easier for people to think up an app and make one, you know, like, and I think that that is like that if Apple just focused on that, it would be a whole bunch of new people developing, you know. And the thing is, is that there are so many ideas. I've been talking to friends that are doing some vibe coding right now. They're actually releasing products or getting ready to put them into the App Store store. And they're totally vibe coded. I've been a little bit hesitant to do that, but they've been vibe coding stuff that they're actually planning to release. And it's quirky little ideas that they had that they were able to spend instead of two months or three months of development or finding a programmer or whatever, they're able to spend a weekend hacking through something and getting something that does the weird thing they need to do in production. Will it make a lot of money? Probably not. But if it makes $1,000 or $2,000 and they have A, A and they have the product now, that's working for them in production, it works. And that's what AI I think opens up is lots and lots of little apps that are very, very specialized, that aren't, that don't. No one's trying to make a living on them. They made them over a weekend that solved one problem that they had in whatever part of life that they had. And I think that getting that to be really, really effective would probably be the low hanging fruit that I would focus a lot on. I know that's not sexy, but it would make a huge difference. That and just being able to conversationally find things in my email would be great. I'm looking for this, that I talked to this person sometime more than 10 years ago about this thing. Where are those emails? You know, like, and I think that they were at this, you know, whatever. And being able to suck through my email and just be able to find that thing, that would be transformational for me. Siri working doesn't matter to me. Like, it doesn't. Like, sure, someday it'd be great if Siri worked. But I think that this focus on you being able to ask Siri something. I mean, I think that so many people now are using ChatGPT and everything else. I think Apple needs to do things, but I don't know if they need to do that immediately. That's a hard lift. It's not going to work well for a while and they could be doing things that made a difference for people very, very quickly in the next couple months.

[Leo Laporte]

So Interestingly, last week ChatGPT 5 came out and the response has been mixed. Some people say. Oh, some people say, generally I think it was overhyped. And so the response is kind of based on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think mine was kind of mad.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. I've been using it to vibe code and it's actually the best I've had. But that's neither here nor there. Apple is probably looking at this thinking, yeah, it's probably good we're not in this particular business at the moment. They are Planning to integrate ChatGPT into iOS Apple Intelligence with 26 apparently according to 9to5Mac. Should they.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I think being able to tie things in, I mean this is how you solve the problem immediately is you, you, you have people, especially people who are paying their subscription to OpenAI and have it easily integrated with all the other stuff that I'm, that I'm already doing. It seems like it makes a lot of sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, if you want GPT5, you will get it with Siri, apparently with writing tools, with visual intelligence, sometime in 26. You will also in 26 get some interesting new features. We've talked last week about app intents and the intention, although not probably till next year at the earliest of six Siri to let you by voice control features on the device, whether it's the iPhone or the Mac. I think that's kind of interesting. Although we had that with Bixby and does anybody still use Bixby? I don't think so.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I forgot.

[Alex Lindsay]

Even though I think they even stopped calling it the Bixby button on the phone.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the best thing though. Did you ever use it, Andy? Because you really could tell Bixby to do something on the phone and would do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've always been a fan of in a very, very considered and curated way that having a physical button on the device that does something significant. Oddly enough, it was the Amazon Fire phone that started this off. It had a feature where you just look at this thing and tell me more about it or barcode readers and stuff like that. But the thing is, Bixby was not as good as what people wanted it to be. But what Apple has, I think that Samsung and no other of phone maker has, is that they have that kind of control or unity amongst its developers.

[Jason Snell]

That.

[Alex Lindsay]

Any other company could do stuff like that with app intents. However, only Apple has that ability to really make it use the carrot and the stick for its developers to say, I really want every single app out there to support app intents because it's no good if suddenly it's like, oh wow, great, there's an app intents sort of thing on Android, but it really only works with Google, Google apps and three apps that I don't use. I'm not going to switch to those to do list apps just to make these work. Whereas on Apple if you simply understand that, you can say, hey Shlomo.

[Jason Snell]

Give.

[Alex Lindsay]

Me all the notes that I made about the iPhone 17 and focus on ideas that aren't just a quick idea, but something a little bit more fleshed out and it can actually go to lift the databases of multiple apps, collate all this together and basically report back to me on everything that I was sort of making interest in in this device. If it only works with one or two things, it may as well not work at all. That's always been Microsoft's problem. It's always been Android's problem. Because you don't have this problem.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to discover.

[Alex Lindsay]

It has to be reliable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How it works or what works with and stuff. Here's a feature, though, I think would be massive. People have looked in the code of iOS 26, the beta, and have seen live translation for AirPods somehow in there that is interesting to me. That is something that Google has promised, Microsoft has promised, Meta has promised, but nobody's really delivered on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's a really tricky problem. You're talking about challenging. I mean, I worked on some stuff where we were dealing with commands. You know, you want to give commands to a. To a device. And we went to hundreds of houses. So like to get this right with all the reverb and everything else. Hundreds of houses, many, many people with many different accents. We hired actors to do all of this stuff over a year, you know, and we were renting all these different houses and renting all this other stuff so that we could. So that the. We could model, like, what is this going to sound like? And how do I. How do I make sure I understand what they're saying and how, you know, and it was a. So when we think about, oh, it's just translation. Well, now I'm going to convert another language in a market with tons of other voices going on, and I got to figure out who's talking to me, how it's going to work. But I mean, but. But again, to Andy's point, it has to work all the time or it doesn't. Like, if you start trying to do a translation, you walk up to the market and the person's speaking in Spanish and you want to understand what they're going to say. It's got to be pretty good at understanding where they are in front of you, or you're going to go, oh, this doesn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like AirPods have enough intelligence maybe to do that. This is, by the way, maybe a 5 out of 10 on the rumor scale, 9 to 5. Mac was looking at the beta 6, the developer beta 6, which came out recently, and they spotted a new system asset that appears to depict a gesture triggered by pushing both stems at once.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And they haven't announced this, but it feels to me like there's probably going to be. We all kind of expect an AirPods Pro 3 announcement sometime, either at the iPhone event or later. IPhone event would have been great place for it. Maybe they'll do it there. And this sounds like one of those things that you might hold and announce at that event and say, we're doing this even if. If as the report says it probably will work on a couple prior they.

[Leo Laporte]

Say AirPods Pro second generation and the fourth generation AirPods regular AirPods.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

So that's. It's interesting and you need your phone and you know, if it's going to be a two way translation, I assume that means that you got to have your phone out so that its speaker will translate for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good point.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah but because otherwise you can't. But like it's. Look, if we can get this to happen, imagine how amazing that will be because it means that potentially Everybody who's got AirPods can speak to anybody else. Who's got who's. I mean I want to say any language in the world, but that's never true with these translation things. It's always the five languages that Apple supports out of the box.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

Pretty cool. Pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We did get a new public beta update. I don't know if this is related to the beta.

[Alex Lindsay]

Nothing's a dev, just a dev beta.

[Leo Laporte]

This is beta 6, the dev beta.

[Jason Snell]

Beta 6 there may be this week.

[Leo Laporte]

We also got a new public beta. So we're in beta 2 of the public beta beta. So I don't know where, where those line up. Maybe it's beta 5. Developer beta 5.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that does feel like we're getting.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty close to the gold mass.

[Alex Lindsay]

Weekly updates is a good cadence.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've been very happy except for that as I mentioned, the Korean sudden Korean insertion. I have to ask, come to think of it, chatgpt. What, what that, what that means.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was only experiencing one problem on my iPad and with the update to the public beta now Picture in PICT YouTube is working again. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well, they fixed the camera, the weird camera thing. So in. For people who don't know about this, there's a new metaphor in liquid glass. The idea that it's a little glass bubble floating on top of stuff. And they decided to implement this metaphor in the camera app which has a different metaphor. And they implemented the one metaphor on top of the other other metaphor which created a complete metaphor collapse. J hate to say I hate it when metac what it means is, you know, in the camera app, if you've got something to the right that you want to go to, you swipe and the concept is you swipe to the left because you're spinning like a control and the new one comes in, you're basically picking up that controller and spinning it. Well, with Liquid glass. What they did is like, no, no, now you're not spinning the controller, you're moving the liquid blob. So you want to go to the right to drag the liquid blob over the control to the right. Now the control still kind of spins, so it's like, is there a camera move? Like, that's the. That's the metaphorical collapse. So in beta 5, they did the old natural scrolling thing where they put a setting in, and it was basically like, if you don't like swiping to the right to go to the right, you can turn this and then you swipe to the left to go to the right. Like it's always been on the iPhone. And then that was beta 5. In beta 6, that setting was removed because they just said, forget it. And they went back to the old swiping direction. So now when you. When you see that there's stuff to your right. I think part of this is they also bear buried all those features in the camera app behind. So you only really have stills and video at the top level until you start to swipe. That's enough change in the camera app, I think, to have it be that we hid all of the other options and they don't swipe the right direction anymore. I think it was a bridge too far. And like I said, I also think the metaphor doesn't make sense. So they went back to the other system where when you swipe it goes the direction you think it will go. So that's interesting example where like, somebody was really all in on the idea that this is a. To be how the camera app works. And then it met reality and everybody else was like, yeah, sorry, champ, not going to happen. And they went back to the old way.

[Leo Laporte]

So what else is new in iOS 6? There have been some more changes in. In the liquid glass thing. Yeah. You can actually change the reflection, which is kind of interesting. Default buoyant dreamer. Pond Pop. Reflected. What is this?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, these are sounds. Tones. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Not that. That's not glass. Yeah. And there's a new one called Little Bird. Let's hear Little Bird. I like that. The problem with a ringtone that is in all the low register like that is it's not going to pierce my pocket.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think the problem. The problem with the ringtone in general is, is that it makes noise. That's. That's the problem that I have and.

[Leo Laporte]

That people look askance at you when it goes off. Who's that?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, who's got. Who's Got a ringer on. I mean like so it's such a rare thing now to have ringers on for at least in the cult most people that I hang out with, nobody has a ringer on. So someone's ringer comes on, everyone looks at you like, what is wrong with you? Why are we here?

[Jason Snell]

I think people are all over the place because some people have chosen sides about like liquid glass pro or con. But I, the people I have seen who are kind of open minded about, about it feel like Apple has with beta 6 has settled on something that's more legible, a less cool but more legible and that, that like look they're going to people be people who criticize liquid glass for a lot of metaphorical reasons and that it's a weird direction for them to go. And I think, I mean we can have those debates and I think that they're interesting even if they're a little bit academic. I think they're interesting. But, but Apple's got to ship this thing. They got to put this thing on iPhones and they needed to be like functional. And if they ship it where if you scroll in photos or you scroll in the music app and you can't read the floating bubble, they've blown it. So it seems like what they're doing right now is tuning it up to be like let's get it legible, even if it's a little less aggressive than we thought. And you know what, there's nothing saying they can't do anything updates that tweak it, the behavior this year and next year and I think they will. But it sure feels like with beta 6 they are prioritizing legibility a little bit more, which I think they got to do. You got to do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they're expanding the reach of it. Some of the subtler points of this, of this user language is not just liquid glass on the top of your screen, but also interfaces in motion. And I don't have the developer beta 6 installed on my phone yet, but I've been looking at the videos over the past day or so and so we're seeing a lot of stuff where like now when you toggle a switch you will see like that sort of rainbow, like chromatic distortion as you're moving it. When you are sliding things through tabs, there is a little bit more of a bubble, a little bit more of a liquid effect as you're going. And that's, it's not just how this looks when you're looking at a static screen and trying to read something that's underneath display, but also the feedback that you get to acknowledge that. Okay, I, as the interface manager have acknowledged that you are moving the selecting switch and moving it to another position so that you're not guessing as to what's happening. It really is. It's not just a two dimensional interface. It's not even just a three dimensional interface. It's also, it's four dimensions because it is also communicating your movement through time as you're interacting with it.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels a little bit too much like clicking on breast implants to me, but that's just me. This is the new toggle. Look, it's just, I don't know, you know, maybe you guys don't have a lot of experience with naked breast implants, but trust me, it's exactly what they look like.

[Jason Snell]

Interesting. Thank you, Dr. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know how I know? Somebody once asked me to sign, sign one.

[Alex Lindsay]

That'S all Institute or.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no. Apparently either pre op or post op, I'm not sure which.

[Jason Snell]

I don't know why.

[Leo Laporte]

One of those things that if it happens to you, you don't, you don't forget it rapidly. What else is new? So it's a little. I do like the, I do like the, the clothes clock. The way the clock moves up and down now around pictures and stuff. That's kind of nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

You can also see a lot of fights, a lot of fights been going on for a long, long time, are finally being resolved. I don't know who posted it, but someone noticed that the calculator app now has restored the clear button.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny? Why did they take that out? I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

They assumed that. Well, this is not a push button calculator. This is like a text field edit that you can basically hit the delete key. We don't need that anymore. But they had obviously people fighting inside saying, but it's supposed to be a calculator. It's one of the last skeuomorphic things we have. It's actually, it's actually tailored off of one of Steve Jobs is like favorite calculators.

[Leo Laporte]

You have it all clear, but you don't have the clear, which is just clear the last entry. Yeah, yeah. And I think you need the, the clear as well as the all clear. I'm with the Steve Jobs contingent on this.

[Alex Lindsay]

The only, the only time that, that, that a calculator button like clear, all clear button kind of off is when they go so far into the mimicry that they turn into an AC button where it mimics the function of turning the calculator off or on, which on some calculators is like duplicating the clear button. I'm saying you are not turning this off. It is an application that's one step too far. That's the difference between a calendar app that looks like a calendar and one that we putting actually torn off little bits of paper off the top because you're moving to a new day.

[Jason Snell]

That's.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's putting a hat on a hat.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S a little, little skeuomorphic. All right, you're watching Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news with Andy Inoco, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. So glad you're here. We do the show Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC, which I only mentioned because you could watch it live. You don't have to. It's a podcast. You could download it from our site from your favorite podcast player, even get the video on YouTube. But. But if you want to watch live, there are eight different platforms you can watch it on. Club Twit members watch behind the velvet rope in the lovely access. It's kind of like the champagne room access in our Club Twit Discord.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a byob bottle room. It's a bottle service.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a bottle room without the bottle. Yeah, you do your own bottle. If it's Mexican Coke, go right ahead.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know what you like. We're not gonna tell you. We're not gonna tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to carefully. Yes, but then there's also for the, for the unwashed masses, the, the general public, there is YouTube, Twitch TV, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Currently 1143 people watching on all those platforms. It's nice to have you. That's a small fraction of the total people who watch, but it's always nice to know that. And one of the reasons to watch live is so you can interact with us and, and we watch. Watch Henri, I see you on the YouTube chat. And Carl and Moose Espionage is in our discord and Dr. Dew. So there's, you know, we get a lot of people watching on a lot of different platforms. Say hi if you're on one of those eight platforms and I'll, I'll say hi back. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Jason Snell]

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.

[Jason Snell]

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

[Alex Lindsay]

Bon voyage.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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

[Alex Lindsay]

Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits.

[Andy Ihnatko]

With finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 Eligible trade in eg iPhone.

[Jason Snell]

11 Pro for well qualified credits end.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And balance due if you pay off earlier cancel contact T Mobile this is.

[Jason Snell]

One of the most spectacular venues with all kinds of character and hospitality scenery. These people in this kind of task valley, they love when you come to see what they have to offer.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm JJ Harrison, Ellensburg rodeo clown and I want to invite you to the rodeo.

[Jason Snell]

Come hang out with us in Ellensburg.

[Leo Laporte]

Great rodeo, great time.

[Jason Snell]

Two performances on Saturday. One is the extreme Bulls of the Year event.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not miss the Ellensburg Rodeo August 29th through September 1st. We'll see you there. Back to the rumor mill. We'll get to government action momentarily. Actually, we might have to because the sadness pit. The sadness pit is just around the corner because there's some question now whether iPhone 17s will cost more for a couple of reasons. One, thanks to a nice gold bar with a corning glass disc on top of it, Donald Trump has decided not to charge tariffs to Apple for the iPhones not made in the US because Apple has promised in addition seven and a half billion dollars to Corning in the US in addition to its $600 billion US factory expenditure. So that you know, these they're Apple's trying.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They've apparently convinced the president that yeah, we're not going to be able to build the iPhone here yet, but we'll make steps towards that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Otherwise known as Tim has Tim, Apple has Donald Trump's number. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the. Yeah, it was was a little hard to watch.

[Alex Lindsay]

For years, for years I've said that the most single most embarrassing product that Apple has ever made out of gold was the solid gold Apple watch. I can't believe that this, that they've actually done something to actually exceed that. This is the most. It's borderline disgusting.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim even says it's 24 karat gold. Mr. President.

[Jason Snell]

So glass on top.

[Alex Lindsay]

He lifted it with one hand. So we're not talking about like, yeah, I'm shy. I'm sure they gave him the cash equivalent like after the cameras were off.

[Leo Laporte]

But then late breaking news this morning, apparently President Tucker, I mean Trump has decided to put off the Chinese tariffs for another three months.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Tsmc, by the way, also said that because they're building fact they should be exempt in the US that they will also be exempt from, from this.

[Leo Laporte]

Get to just say that.

[Jason Snell]

I think, well, they, I think they said that they were reassured or something like that. But the idea is the same, which is, and this is the thing where we're, he's not going to say, oh, it's because of the CHIPS act, because that's Biden, so we can't talk about that. But like they, that's why they're building these factories in the US because they.

[Leo Laporte]

Committed to this last administration.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean the truth is since 2016, the administration, no matter who was the president, has been pushing for an expans of American manufacturing. And so Apple has gone along with that. And it's one of those things where like there was a period where the most logical thing to do in terms of money was for Apple to do everything in China. And then we've talked about it like over time it's been like, oh, everything's in China. So they've been trying to diversify and at the same time the US has said you really need to bring some manufacturing back to the US So now financially it actually makes more sense for them to do this in part because if they don't do it, all of their other products will cost a lot more money. But you know, I'm not willing to say that it's a bad thing for Apple to spend more than half a trillion dollars trying to improve the, the manufacturing capabilities of the United States where it's based. I think that that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You could give some credit to the administration for putting enough pressure on these.

[Jason Snell]

Guys to do that and to enter the Biden administration for the CHIPS act and to the previous Trump administration for trying to put pressure on, on this. I mean, we've seen in the auto industry has been doing time. Right. But it's recently happened with tech companies. However, I will also say that I think Tim Cook being a pretty good politician and his goal is to make Apple not be destroyed by the whims of the president.

[Leo Laporte]

And any, and by the way, any president, this is, that's always his mission.

[Jason Snell]

That's True, that's true. Although this president seems to be more whimsical than others with his politics policies. But, you know, in the end, Tim Cook, his very wise person who kind of tries to calculate out what exactly he needs to do, decided he needed to grovel at the White House, and so he did. And was it ugly to see it? I think yes. I think it was extremely ugly to see it. And I know a lot of people were really mad about it, and I understand why, because it was really ugly and he was forced to grovel. I would say that I, I am limiting my anger about Tim Cook doing that and focusing on the fact that I'm actually more angry that Tim Cook felt he or knew he had to do it because of the current state of the United States of America. But be that as it may, you know, he did it. I thought it was really ugly. But what, what he was doing there was basically getting the best deal he could for Apple to keep doing what it's doing. So I get it. I just hate it. And I wouldn't want to. To do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I mean, I, I held off on like posting about it or even putting on. Going on blue sky about it, even though I was pretty upset, borderline pretty upset about it when, when the news came out. Because as Jason said, I appreciate that this is. These are unusual circumstances and Tim Cook is the CEO of company that employs 100,000 people. People all of whom want to continue to have their jobs. The fact that the stock market gave Apple like the best. It's the best day since 2020.

[Leo Laporte]

11.6% for the week shows.

[Alex Lindsay]

It shows. That wasn't just five by Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

It was from the gold bar alone.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep. But however, it's still. It was just such a disgustingly craven act. I feel, I felt, I felt as though he's gone. We've watched Tim go from. From a responsible and mature policy of exercising diplomacy and keeping the channels of conversation open to bending the knee to.

[Leo Laporte]

With what everybody does to.

[Alex Lindsay]

With this. But now he's gone towards licking the boot. And now I want to know what's the step after that and what's the step after that?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, years ago, it's never enough with an authoritarian.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, years. I mean, for a long time on the show, I've mentioned that it's not necessarily a terrible thing that Tim Cook will say if the Chinese Communist Party says, hey, we want you to pull all VPN apps off of the Chinese app store, say, okay, certainly. Well, we're going to certainly do that. The question in my mind has always been but that leaves the question where is the line that seat that Tim Cook or Apple will not cross? When they ask for something where they're saying I don't care what it's going to do to our stock price, I don't care what it's going to do to our business, we will not cross this line. And I couldn't help but think that because this is such a craven act, not only the visual of this but also the fact that he's underscoring a whole bunch of misinformation that's going out about Apple's investment and what this Corning plant is actually going to achieve. But also again the visual of it, it makes me wonder that whatever. I've always thought that there is a non 00% chance that Apple will allow the government to break into imessage encryption. Maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 1/2 a percent but definitely non zero today I think that whatever those chances were, it's now 10 times greater. Cuz we have seen that this is how florid a gesture he will make for Trump to appease his.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think Apple's line is getting access to the phone. I think that they're not going to. I don't think that they would go down that path and I think they.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm saying it's just 10 times greater. My mind is 1% if it was half a percent, now it's 5%.

[Jason Snell]

I don't know in the UK would suggest that it might be less than you think. But I, I think part of his calculation is hoping that this gets the spotlight, gets the eye of Sauron off of Apple for a while.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And that the subject never turns back to encryption also. So by standing up to the UK and getting the US government kind of on side for that. That is interesting because it might mean now that there's a decreased chance of that because the U.S. government has sort of picked a side which is hey, you know UK government, you can't have access to all of Apple's secret encrypted stuff. However, I think you're. I think the point that you're right on Andy. Absolutely 100% is we don't know what would happen happen if the full force of the US government was put on Apple to just basically break open all of its encryption. And would they eventually have to agree to that? I think it's possible. But they do. They have some lines but like we live in a world where I think anything is possible.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's been the line that they've been reliable because I think it's so tied into their business model. I think Apple would take a lot of pain before they turn that over because that privacy inside the phone is so part of the business model that they built themselves around that it would, it's kind of like disassemble. This is the stuff that they're doing right now. Apple's got a bunch of cash. Sure, we'll build some stuff in the United States for you. You know, like, this is all excess cash as far as they're concerned. Instead of giving it back to shareholders.

[Jason Snell]

This is their game. They're actually good at manufacturing and stuff. Right. So they're like, sure, spend money. We got that. Manufacturing, we're good at that. Let's do it. This is like Apple's. If the government's going to force Apple to do something, this is like the easiest thing for Apple to do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So. And again, who knows what will happen? You know, how long will it take to build these? And who knows? You know, the, you know, you can, you can say we're going to spend $500 billion and then you get billion into it. The, the administration changes and you're like, well, the weather kind of changed and I don't think we need to spend any more money. So, so the, you know, because they're not signing like binding contracts about this. They're just making announcements. And so, so I think that there's still this kind of, you know, that, that. But asking Apple to restructure its privacy inside the phone, I think would be something that would be unlikely.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be the bridge too far, I think.

[Alex Lindsay]

But there's steps beyond that. Like imagine the Immunization Administration, the Department of justice, saying, yeah, we don't like this app that's on your App Store that helps people to get alerts when they think that there are ICE agents operating the neighborhood. We would like you to pull that down. We don't have a law against this, but, oh, no, we'll take it down.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, they'll take it down.

[Alex Lindsay]

We also think that it's not a good idea to have Chinese developers, like, actually making apps that are for. Available in the App Store. We would like you to find reasons to take off all those apps.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They would, they would, they would absolutely do both of those things.

[Jason Snell]

And I think this is, and this is my greater point, which is if, if people want to get mad at Apple about stuff like that, they can. I would say the problem is that if we Have a government that says stuff like that. Our problem is the government. Our problem is what's happening in our country, not Apple. Because Apple is a, is a corporation, a profit seeking, publicly owned corporation whose goal ultimately, ultimately is to, to keep its value and to make lots of money. And they're going to do whatever they can to survive. And they will hold their principles because it, it benefits them and provides value to the company. But if the US Government is going to destroy them, if they don't do what they say, they will bend the knee, they will do that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And in other countries they've taken absolutely, they've done nothing. So things they've already proven that that's not even a bridge too far for them. That's something that, that's, that's what we call Tuesday. You know, like, you know, like it's not, you know, like them taking stuff off because a totalitarian government is asking them to do it is something that they've absolutely been willing to do in the past. You know, it's not something, it's just there, it's, it's a practical term there of state. But what they do, what no government's been able to get them to do is open up the phone.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, and I want to mention how come, how come news, the Newsmax app has never been like the, the top pick on the, on the App Store. How come, how come CNN app is, is the number 10?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm saying, why is Elon Musk suing for Groz?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'll say one thing for, I'll say one thing for Elon Musk take over a Twitter. The one thing that he's done that was very, very good is allowing the community to add notes. Because every time he comes off with something baloney like this, his own users are saying, actually no, the App Store rankings have always often have had alternatives. Still.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Deep Seek, the Chinese AI was number one for a while.

[Jason Snell]

That's a thing that Trump and Musk, even though they're, they're on the outs, have in common is that idea that like they'll just shoot from the hip with things that have no backing because they're kind of grumpy about something because they're, you know, blood sugar is low or whatever. And that was his latest. He's got an attorney who apparently gets paid to, you know, go through to, to post through Elon's various manic episodes and, and then they get to the other side and they're like, oh, there's nothing here at all. I Want to mention something? Jon Gruber wrote a piece about Tim Cook going to the White House. Yeah. And I just want to throw it in there because it's. Andy was asking, like, where did they draw the line?

[Leo Laporte]

Gold, frankincense and silicon.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And he's trying to connect some dots. I agree with a lot of what John writes. There's one thing that I'm. I feel like is a little bit out there in left field, but it does fit into what Andy was talking about, which is he says, hey, did you notice that Tim Cook didn't go to Saudi Arabia, didn't go on that tour, didn't. Didn't go with Trump to the Middle East?

[Leo Laporte]

The President noticed that and that called it out.

[Jason Snell]

And he said. And so what Gruber is saying, and again, I don't know if I will go this far, but he's like, perhaps Apple opted out of that specifically because they. Tim Cook is not interested in meeting mbs. Right. They're not meeting this guy who killed a journalist and. And has killed a bunch of other people, too, allegedly. And so he was like, nope.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Trump noticed him as gay, let's not forget. And that is not a good country for people.

[Jason Snell]

Not a good country. A lot of those countries. Countries are not really good for that either. So I think, you know, there. That is part of it, too, is one, does that show you a line Apple decided not to cross? And two, is everything that has happened now because Apple decided not to cross that line? And that we don't know. And I don't. I don't know if I, you know, I know enough about, or agree enough with John's piece to go that far. But I think that a lot of what John says is. Is true about how, you know, the big problem here is that this had to happen because corporations behave in a certain way and our government right now behaves in a certain way. And the rest of it is, you know, but again, I wanted to say a lot of people really angry, a lot of people really disappointed. I don't want to police anybody's feelings. I mean, I'm certainly. I thought the whole thing was kind of gross and debasing, and that was the point of it in a lot of ways. And I think the funniest part of it, by the way, is that Trump seemed kind of uninterested in the gold bauble that he was given, which is funny. You go all that way, you make that, you debase yourself. And he's like, yeah, whatever. And. And then also there Were a bunch of press who were there asking questions about Jeffrey Epstein while Tim Cook just gives his little blank stare. Like, I mean it's very much like I bet you're wondering how I got here. Like you know, did you also was.

[Alex Lindsay]

There even like a little bit of a dig like after the presentation say oh yeah, the Tim, Tim Cook with brilliant guy has every positive attribute then pause. Except maybe athletic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was a really weird show.

[Jason Snell]

And look, Tim is a workout man, not athletic.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean the guy's. Yeah. Pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

What he doesn't play golf is that.

[Jason Snell]

I think, I think because he's, he's, he's tall and skinny or something like that. But like I don't know because he doesn't play golf. Probably that's it. But he's, he's a workout, a workout maniac. I would not.

[Leo Laporte]

He's very athletic.

[Jason Snell]

I suspect that Tim Cook could probably best Donald Trump in just about any.

[Leo Laporte]

Athletic athletic challenge walking across the room. The White House has long been called the people's House. Gruber concludes the embarrassment of this week's Oval Office bending of the knee isn't cooks or apples alone. It's an embarrassment for our entire nation. It's not him, it's not them, it's us. Yeah, I mean we try not to get too political on our shows. Sometimes it's very difficult and of course sometimes there's an intersection between the topics we cover and politics. This is one of those situations. But it is hard to sometimes it's hard to keep shut quiet on all of this. As we watch our nation become more and more authoritarian.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have to admit that I've worked in a lot of different countries with a lot of different set of rules and you just. I have to admit I've become very thick skinned of like just go into whatever country and you go okay, what are the set of rules that I'm living inside of here? And I think that yeah, you just.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep your head down. Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's the key. Well, I mean. Well, yeah, you just try to adhere to, to the ones that, that you can. That, that make the most sense. And you know it's easy for us to make any kind of decision about this but you are having someone who's representing hundreds of thousands of workers and shock stockholders.

[Leo Laporte]

Well and it's not entirely everything else.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Is pretty chaotic situation for the, for him. And finding some way to keep it less chaotic I think is the goal.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things that will happen. I mean it's great to bring more jobs.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I Just want to say that United.

[Leo Laporte]

States, I'm not against.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's easy for us to talk about how Tim Cook shouldn't done that, but there are people's lives like they're living that they're making it out Apple that they get laid off if things happen, you know, like, you know, Apple laying off 5,000 people because of all these tariffs or all this stuff that's, you know, it's 5,000 or 20,000 people with their family, you know, including their families that get affected by that. And what he had and his. And he's accountable for that like he's the CEO.

[Alex Lindsay]

That that is, that absolutely needs to be acknowledged. However, that doesn't mean that when a CEO does not does something like this and does not do something that is perhaps a little bit more. I'm not going to editorialize like when a CEO does something like this, that does not mean that we don't call him on it and that we don't flag this particularly. And I've always thought that Apple is particularly important to flag these sort of things because they don't present themselves as meta like we are objectively evil. We don't care about the effects on our users. We just want more. More money. More money. They're not Google where they, they say, well, we're a $3 trillion company with our hands and a lot of things they keep trying to promote themselves as, oh, we just want to make the planet a better place. We're not like the other companies that just want to abuse and exploit our users. No again, they are a company. There is a machine in the basement that is responsible for generating money. And absolutely nothing may be allowed to interfere with the grease into the gears of that machine and the efficiency of that machine. And as soon as something is introduced into to the system that threatens the stability of that machine, that's when you find out exactly how hippie all the different principles of a company or an individual can be tossed out the window.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There's a lot of bad things you can do. Handing handing a piece of gold with a piece of glass on it is a pretty small thing compared to what other companies. The other things that could do that would be more problematic.

[Jason Snell]

It's bad, but there are other things that have been worse, but it's still bad. And I agree with Andy. I think that the two things I keep saying are one is this is the state of the United States right now, is the president's being very active and demanding things and if you don't do it, he will punish you. And we've seen it in a lot of areas. And the other is corporations, right? And like, hey, capitalism. A lot of people have thoughts about capitalism. I'll just say this, corporations are profit seeking entities and corporate value and they've got employees and they got all these things and you don't. I'll frame it in a different way because you can be disappointed at Tim. And I've seen a lot of people are like, well, if I were him, I just wouldn't have done it. And I guess I, I would say you don't get to be the CEO of a trillion dollar company unless you are in that slot of its corporate, its value, its revenue, its employees, its shareholders. It's the market, it's all of those things. And he behaved exactly as a corporate CEO would behave in that moment. And if you don't like his behavior, I guess what I would say is, is it Tim Cook or is it the fact that Apple is a gigantic corporation that as Andy said, has values. Number one value is money.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, and staying in business, I mean, and not losing, you know, all of those permutations. There's all these, there's like, I love watching the Manning cast on, you know it's going to start up again with, with the Manning brothers watching Monday Night Football because they're the amount of data that they dump on like what a quarterback's thinking while they're in the backfield. And it's so easy for someone to sit in the, in the stands and go, I can't believe that quarterback is so bad. And you're just like, you know, you have safeties who fake one way and then they go the other way. You have all these other things that are, that are going on and you're trying to figure it out. And yeah, you get sacked every once in a, trying to figure that out. And the point is, is that a CEO has a lot of. I just want to say that a CEO has a lot of things that they're worried about and you know, if they can get out of this unscathed by just giving a piece of gold, you know, like a hunk of gold to somebody who seems to think that that's important and then saying, oh yeah, we'll build a bunch of stuff there, you know, like that's, that is, you know, I mean, I think that, that, that's a relatively low cost. I, I don't, I don't like it. I think it's, yeah, it's crazy that we have that there was any need to do that so I'm not saying that it's not a crazy thing that has do with to be done, but I'm saying that it could be worse.

[Alex Lindsay]

Last point I'll make is simply that again, I agree with nearly everything that you're talking about. Actually probably everything you're talking about. But we also need to point out that Apple is not a car repair shop that is hanging on by a thread that can't afford to pay its employees, is trying to find a new business. This is a $3 trillion company. And that there are things that it has to do and there are things that, that are mostly voluntary. Let's say that you can debase yourself, have a debasement meter that is required. Is it important to debase myself by 20%? Yeah. 30%. Yeah. 40%. 80%. Probably not. Let's go to 50%. And I think that he debased himself 80 something.

[Jason Snell]

By the way, where's.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you're wondering where you making Apple look horrible.

[Jason Snell]

If you wonder where you keep your debasement meter, the answer is obvious. You keep it in debasement.

[Leo Laporte]

In debasement.

[Jason Snell]

But I guess, I mean my, my, I, I think we're all in violent agreement about a lot of this. I would just say the counter to it's a big company. It's not just hanging on by a thread is. Yeah but you know, it always is those who have the most to lose who do these sorts of things. So I think that that's part of it too is the more you have to lose the, the more you don't want to lose any of it. And I think that's part of what's going on.

[Alex Lindsay]

You don't, you don't want Colbert like calling you an ass kisser and actually, actually having the new product. They had a product for something called the I kiss.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. I think everybody at Apple knew exactly what was going to happen when they did this. And I think it's really telling and sad that they felt they still needed to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think there's any question that they did, to be honest. I mean you can't tolerate 100% tariff.

[Jason Snell]

I'm not sure the gift needed to happen. That was a calculated move.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's what I'm focusing on.

[Jason Snell]

On their point that they, they felt.

[Leo Laporte]

The gift was smart. The gift was the right. Yeah, the gift probably if it would be. Look, I'm no expert on dealing with dictators, so I don't know but I think it's first of all, how much did it really cost him Besides humiliation?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

Also, how do you like the optics of the. I like to think Apple is so good at managing their public relations that I have to believe there was some sort of argument saying there are so many precious metals that we get out of Utah, we could plate the basin. Does it have to be solid gold inside the solid gold plated White House?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure they debated. Did you see all the gold swag that he's glued on the marble also?

[Jason Snell]

I'll tell you, I'll tell you what. What's almost certain is that this started as a commemorative piece of glass from Corning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

And then they're like, oh, it needs a base. And that. That's where they went. They went for the base case. They had to check their debasement meter.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Someone said, how much does it cost if we just make it solid? Like, like, you know, you're right.

[Alex Lindsay]

It wasn't $40,000.

[Jason Snell]

It's a little plate. Little gold plate thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They melted down some of those Apple Watch editions that they didn't sell.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to be honest, I doubt very much of anything in that Oval Office is solid gold. It's all gold plates. So what's the big deal? You know, even the silverware, I'm sure in the dining room is silver plate. Actually, that's not true.

[Alex Lindsay]

The White House cable system does. Does get qvc, apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Yeah, I think it's very hypothetical to say how bad this can get. And I certainly don't want to do that thought exercise until it gets there. It could very well get there, but we don't know yet. So let's hope it doesn't. We're only. We're only, you know, three and a half years away from how bad could it get? We're only. We're a seventh of the way through already.

[Jason Snell]

No, don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Martial law and Cupertino next. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. This is Andy Inacco, Jason Snell and Alex Lindsay. But Blair, blame me for all of the political stuff. That's my fault. You can blame me. Let's see. Speaking of politics, Japan is now forcing more browser choice on the iPhone coming in December. This isn't the. Beyond requiring Apple to allow third party app stores, they will also have to allow third party browsers. Now, as you may or may not know, you might say, well, isn't that already the case? No. All of the browsers on the iPhone currently are based on some the of Safari's webkit. They're just a front end to WebKit. Apparently the Japanese government's smart enough to realize that and as the EU did. Right. I mean, the EU and Apple was kind of maliciously compliant with the EU regulations, saying, okay, you can have a Firefox that's based on the Firefox engine, but only in the EU. To which Firefox said, well, that means we have two complete development tracks for iOS. We're not going to do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

And in addition to that, they're putting all kinds of, they're basically keeping a whole bunch of entitlements to themselves or exclusive to WebKit that are kind of required if you're going to have a modern web browser out there. I think that there was a hearing last month between the eu, which is basically compliance hearings between Microsoft spoke, Google spoke, Apple spoke, basically being asked pointed questions about where are you with this progress on this order that we made? And lots. And there was, there's opportunity for other people in the industry who are affected to talk about it. And essentially other browser engine manufacturers like Google and Mozilla were saying, yeah, it's just so impossible to comply with. It's impossible for us to create a version of our browser engine that would actually comply with everything that Apple's asking us to do. So there's absolutely no point in doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, yeah, I feel like Apple at this, at some point there'll be enough countries requiring this that Apple might just say, okay, but again, they.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They, they make billions every year that they're not doing it. So, so the thing is that, that they're, of course they're just going to pull one pin out at a time. I mean, again, if, if someone told me it doesn't matter what it is that I have to do something that I don't want to do, I would be maliciously compliant. Like, that's how I, that, that's how, that's how most people.

[Leo Laporte]

So you do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're not going to go, oh, okay, I totally agree with you. Now I'm going to give you everything you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Bag of nickels.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have paid, I have paid my parking tickets in pennies.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? In fact. Really? Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

When I was a kid and not recently, not in the last 30 years, but when I was in my late teens, if I got a parking ticket, I had this huge pile of pennies for whatever reason and I had this little thing that would sort them so I didn't have to count them. So I would just pour them into a bag and here' your $16 in pennies. You know, and they would say, you can't, you can't pay it that way. And you're like, it's legal tender. You can, you know, I can pay it that way. And I would do that every single time. And that's all Apple's doing. And, and the thing is, is that, you know, we have accountants so that we don't have to pay more taxes. We have, you know, other things, like no one gives more than they have to. And so what Apple's doing is they have a bunch of stuff that's nebulous and they're going to give exactly the minimum that they have to because they don't believe they should have to do any of this stuff. If they agreed with it, they do it all. All. But they don't. And so they're going to, you know, that's what, that's what you're going to get, and that's what every government's finding out, is that it's a quagmire because they don't know what, how to write the law. They don't know how to write the law that would define the thing that they, that they, that they need. And so they'll, so they're going to figure it out going back and forth. And every year that they do that, Apple has the opportunity to a, figure out what they're going to do next, like how do they build tools that protect them from those things as well as generate billions of dollars. And so there's no. Apple has no incentive to go any faster than they're going now.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep. So Australia and Japan and the EU need to put enough hurt on them. Basically have a, have a slightly crazy leader that says, oh, by the way, we're going to give you, we're going to have to have you pay a $100 tariff on every single iPhone you import into this country until you comply.

[Andy Ihnatko]

With all this stuff.

[Alex Lindsay]

Then you'll see the head of the, the problem is, hey, we gave, we're giving you a solid gold iPhone. We love complying with everything that you're demanding us to do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But after, after giving, saying they're going to build a bunch of stuff in the United States and giving a gold whatever in the White House, them doing something crazy just means another crazy thing happens, too. So the thing is that it's, you know, an American company being, quote, unquote, oppressed by other countries will have an equal and opposite reaction from our country. So there's an equilibrium there that everybody's sitting inside.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm saying it would mean more to Me, if they hadn't. If they work so reliably tossing out the excuse, oh, we comply with all the laws and all the countries that we operate. So if they're asked to do something, letter of the law. If they're asked to do something that they consider to be distasteful, then they simply hide behind that they didn't comply with just the letter of the law. When they're asked to get rid of VPNs. They killed every VPN. They didn't say you didn't. This law does not define what a VPN actually is. So we're gonna create this brand new classification of app. We're going to kill two or three of these, but we're going to keep the other 12 in there. They didn't do that. They said, doesn't make. We don't. It doesn't cost us anything to do that. Great, we'll get rid of it. Doesn't care. If there's. If it means it's going to be easier for people to not speak out against their government, we don't care. There is no penalty for us to comply 100%, we're going to comply 100%. But when there is a reason why they don't want to do, do it. Okay, then they're not interested in complying with the law. They're interested in seeing how much they can get away with. And that's something that we should be calling Apple out on again.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Wait, wait, wait. We have to play the tape that, the Jason Snell tape. What is Apple? What's Jason? What's the.

[Jason Snell]

Which one? Money. Money. Money.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, no, no, no. It's a corporation.

[Jason Snell]

It's a corporation. It's a profit seeking corporation that is motivated by money and shareholder value.

[Leo Laporte]

It has a fiduciary responsibility to his stakeholders to make more money every month.

[Jason Snell]

Charity.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not a charity.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm the one who keeps saying it's a $3 trillion company. Never forget that. Yeah, all I'm saying, all I'm saying is that let's hold them up. Let's point out the hypocrisy that they so routinely engage. If you want to say that, if Tim Cook, if Apple's official statements will. Look, we are a profit making company. There's some, there's things that we can negotiate on. We try to talk them out. Talk a government. Government to an equitable solution that makes them happy and will make us happy, will make our users happy. Sometimes that doesn't work out and we feel as though the Only thing we clearly can do is do this. But don't pretend. Apple cannot pretend that when they can't. They can't pick and choose when they're simply falling back on a rule of oh gosh, we have to comply, our hands are tied here.

[Jason Snell]

They can and they do.

[Alex Lindsay]

We should point it out when they're being hypocrites.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The issue is there's no groundswell either. I mean, the users don't care. This is all, this is all developers using Russia.

[Alex Lindsay]

They would care if they were in China.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But when you're talking about Japan and the EU and Australia, the users don't care about any of this. There's no groundswell. Apple has no loss here. This is a bunch of developers using their proxy, which is their government, to try to do something, to push something down the path that they want. But the average user using the phone doesn't care. Like, they don't care about any of this. And so the, they just don't care. They don't care. So, like nobody, even I, I asked my, my wife what she thought. She didn't even know it existed. Like, you know, and so the thing is, is we, we think we're, we're here talking about it and we pay attention to it, but 99% of the population doesn't care, doesn't even know it's happening. Doesn't. It doesn't matter to them. And so it matters to these developers that want to, you know, mostly developers in the top 1% that makes more than a, top 2% that make more than a million dollars. That's who it, that's who cares. So it's rich, rich companies wanting more money from the big company that has more money. But that's, and they're using their proxies to get that more money. But the 99, 98% of the, of the developers aren't getting, none of this is going to change anything for them, you know, and the, and the average user, it's not going to change much for them either, except it probably make it more complicated down the road. So, so there's not like, that's why Apple can do all this stuff and the governments are having trouble because no one's calling and saying why can't we handle this? Except, except for rich developers.

[Alex Lindsay]

I dislike this argument every time it comes up because how popular is Facebook Meta? How popular is TikTok? How popular is Google? How popular is Android? If you were to poll people on the strengths and weaknesses and features of different things, would you find that they care about privacy? Would they care? They care to a limited extent, but not to the extent that Apple extends it. How much they care about all of these different issues. The fact that they, quote, don't care about it doesn't mean it's not an important issue. People don't care. People only care about fire safety and fire regulations and fire codes. When their house burns down and they realize how quickly they came to death, you make them. That's why there are. I don't believe that governments should be dictating every fact of life to people. But there are interests and agencies and people working inside those governments that have an awareness of this issue that goes beyond what individuals actually care about. It goes into what is the healthiest thing for this ecosystem. What is the healthiest thing for the people inside. Inside our country. We have our country. I'm not saying us, but I'm saying a leader saying our country has an interesting perspective that's been going back for the past 500, 600 years. We have a tradition in which this is an area in which we don't allow companies to have a lot of control. So we are imposing this law to do it. I don't care if the, if the people are going to be voting for it or against it. This is why we were hired to create these laws, to create this marketplace. That's why I, that's what, that's just why I don't like the argument that, oh, people don't care about browser choice. Well, people who are invested in browser choice do care about it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And sure, sure, it's, it's, you know, the thing is, is that you can't, can't fix everything for everyone. And still, I still think this is the marquee of Spotify fighting against the marquee of Apple. And they're asking the king to do something about it. And the issue is that also that it is a lot of users are going to notice when they actually, if they're actually successful at this, which they're not going to be. So they're going to notice if Netflix goes. Oh, by the way, you cannot buy, you can't download Netflix on the App Store anymore. We want you to download it from somewhere else. And I've gotten into. I'm. Now I don't. I ended my subscription to Netflix because I've decided I'm just getting rid of all the subscriptions that I have to sign out.

[Leo Laporte]

But how are you going to watch Hunting Wives? Oh, my God.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, I just don't need it. So, so The So, you know, and I, and I. And so the. So I think that again we have a tradition of telling companies what to do when they have a monopoly. And I just don't believe that Apple has a monopoly. And I know that countries have disagreed and they're making decisions about what that looks like. But when a comp, when a company has 25 of the global market, you know, they are usually for the most part left alone. You know, so, so the, you know, and it's there and it's their job to, you know, if the market decides it doesn't want to do that, then the market will go down that path. But they have a minority. Android has won the market, you know, in globally. And so, so the thing is, is that I don't know again, if Apple had, I think this conversation for me would be completely different. If Apple had 85% of the market. Like if, if they had 85% of the installed market of the world, I would like Microsoft did when. Or I'd have more than that. Totally get it. Like we can tell that company whatever they want to tell them, but when they have, you know, a little over 50% of the United States market.

[Leo Laporte]

Honest, as much as I admit it, completely fair. Maybe it's a testament to the success of Apple's marketing might that it feels like they're a monopoly. But they're not.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'll, I'll make this concise. I absolutely respect that opinion. That is a very good factual opinion. I simply disagree with that way of viewing monopolies because you can have an energy company that has only 4% of the energy market, but if they control three states, the three, the three, the. All the people who consume energy inside those three states are going to be suffering a lot because of this company's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically no place, Andy, that you can't buy an Android device. So that, that analogy doesn't hold. Well, there's no monopoly in any market that Apple has. Where it has, has a lock.

[Alex Lindsay]

It has a lock on the market for Apple, for apps that run people.

[Leo Laporte]

Who have purchased Apple devices.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I don't think it's, it's. I don't think that someone who's spent $800, $900 on a phone is going to say gee, I wish I had more choice. I know I will get rid of this phone and buy a thousand dollar phone. I do think that. I do, I don't think that I'm 100% right here. I don't think I respect other opinions. But that explains why I Feel as though if a company, if a country judiciary regulators have decided that in this, decided to define a market in a way that is not exploitative of that company's presence but simply decides to say, look, people who are inside this app marketplace don't have enough choice. And we have lots of evidence, excuse me, we believe we have covered evidence that says that Apple is, or Google or whatever the app market is. They are exploiting this lack of ability to choice to basically make sure that our own apps get privilege. We can basically make sure that our cloud services get privilege. I can, I can understand why a regulator would say that. I want our users in our country to have the choice between saying I don't want to spend another $9 a month for a third cloud backup service when I already spend a lot of money on the one that works well for what I want.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And I think, I think the challenge that the regulators have and I'll end it with this, I won't say add any more to this. The challenge of the radio regulators have is that again, without users caring, they're just dealing with lobbyists and they have to step lightly because no one's really paying attention except for these lobbyists from these companies. And so, so they can't just like say we're going to just do this heavy handed whatever. They have to like lightly put this in because they could easily be blamed to the users who will care if it's suddenly their iPhones are really expensive. So. And they get thrown under the bus and a lot of, there's a lot things get, things get rougher. And so, so I think that's their problem is they don't have any because this, this is such a very weak argument. And no. 1, the general population doesn't care if they had one or the other they'd be okay. But they have a weak cause and they have nobody in the public that cares about it. They can only step so hard and they can only make so many lines. So they have to add them and Apple knows this. So Apple just keeps on adding just what they have to kind of stick with it. But they don't have. The EU doesn't have the leverage to just say we're going to do 100% because then their own people would be upset and people would lose their position in.

[Leo Laporte]

You might agree with what Australia has decided. The federal court in Australia ruled against Apple plus Google finding the companies combined engaged in any competitive conduct, in other words, a duopoly. Both companies had broken the law by misusing their market Power in the way they run their app stores.

[Jason Snell]

Different countries are going to have different rules. I think the interesting thing about the Japan ruling is that they looked at what the EU did and said, said, oh, I see how Apple made it so that nobody would actually build a browser in the EU because of all these rules. So we're going to make the rules so that, you know, they're like trying to steer around the limitations of the EU rules. And this is a thing that we'll see again and again now is different regulators in different countries will pick up the baton from a different country thinking. Because the classic is, well, you did that for them, so, so you can do that for us, but don't do this other thing on top of it. And then it just kind of cascades from there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It may seem like it's complicated for Apple to comply with everybody differently, but what it does is it actually makes it way harder for the browsers to be made because if they have a set of. This is how it works in Japan and this is how it works in the eu, the browsers, you know, it's still going to be difficult for them to do it. And is Japan a large enough market for them to, like, fork, you know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Cry me a river.

[Jason Snell]

It's a very large market for them. And I think then you will start to see double teaming happening where the EU then says, ah, yes, we think Japan's approach is right. And we think that right like this, it's just, it's going to be. Apple is fighting a battle on lots of different fronts and the individual regulators are watching what they're doing in other countries and that you're going to start to see some. It's almost like a network effect where various different countries are going to be like, yeah, yeah, I want that too, but not like that. And Apple's going to have to deal with it. But Apple, you know, Apple can and will as necessary, deal with it.

[Leo Laporte]

All right now, ladies and gentlemen, something we can all disagree on. The Vision Pro segment.

[Jason Snell]

Yay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Andy and I will recuse ourselves as Vision Pro non visionaries and let you guys, Alex and Jason take over.

[Jason Snell]

Alex, take it away.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So I got a new. I got a. I'm borrowing a camera. Which camera would that be? This would be the. The new Blackmagic 180°. So here. And so I.

[Leo Laporte]

You have an Ursa 3D.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I see it. Oh, my God.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's been hiding here the whole time. So so I'll pop the front off here.

[Leo Laporte]

You were smart, you put that cover on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I know exactly it coming in there. So anyway, so this is the Ursa. And it's like if you took a regular Ursa and obviously put two lenses on the front and then stretched it, just pulled it out lengthwise, you end up with this camera. So you've got. It's kind of hard to see if I can pull it a little closer here. So if I pull this, this off again, you will see it here. And so what we have here is again pretty standard. It just feels like an Ursa. And then you have the two lenses. That's the part that matters in this process. So anyway, so there are your lenses and so it is capturing. These are about the same distance as your eyes, which is part of what makes this work. And it captures 280°. And one of the things that's really interesting here is that there have been other cameras like this, the Canon R5 and others. The challenge is that this one actually has metadata that says this is how every set of those lenses is calibrated in the camera so that it knows exactly all the attributes of those lenses. And that's important down the road because that data goes with it into resolve. And then you're able to, when you get it in the headset, it's then correcting for, for that in your headset. And so, so anyway, so we, I got it, I spent, I captured 10 seconds.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all you can edit? What?

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, no, no, no. I captured 10 seconds to make sure it worked. And then I brought a band in like, like the band Liquid was showing up and I was like, well we better make sure this, this app, I've.

[Leo Laporte]

Used this for 10 seconds.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Camera for 10 seconds. And then, and then here is the confidence. So we brought this band and this is a band called Silk Road. They're out of San Jose and my. We saw them play it at a, at an event. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And you have that special microphone on the top.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So this is a. This now this is the Dante version of the Voyage. It's a second order Ambisonic mic. Now I was, we were also capturing their mics. But the ambisonic mic is. What's nice about it is, is that it is. It lets us get a little bit of room, you know that's there. And I'm using it outdoor as well. It's amp, it's a poe. So you just plug it in with as long as you have power on the, on the, on the Ethernet that goes back to a Scorpio. The Scorpio. Then I just fed analog back to the. To the camera just to make sure the camera had some audio there to work with. And so. But I'm capturing eight mics to the Scorpio.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And then if you look at it, this is what the lenses look like there. Here's what's cool now.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that 180 degrees in the viewfinder? Okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So this is 180. It actually does 210 and I'll show you that in a second. This overlay basically tells us in that little box, it shows you this. When someone puts their headset on, this is what they're going to see first. Like, that all fits into their view. If they don't move their head and they look up, you see the little. These little parallelograms on the top. If they just move their eyes up and down, that's what they'll see. And then the, the overall view is what they see all the way around here. So you can jump. You can see here. You can jump from left to right eye. If you want to look at what's. What's actually happening there, obviously you have some audio. It's 90 frames a second.

[Leo Laporte]

Did the band know what you were doing?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, we told.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Were they excited about the idea?

[Andy Ihnatko]

They were super excited. Yeah, they were. They were one for drove down from Davis, I think, and so the drummer, I think. And what we did is. You can see that I kind of composed it in depth so you're thinking less about wide angle. And how do you build things that are happening in depth. And then here's when you look down, one of the things that spirit isn't with the camera. I put that on top. You really want it to be level, otherwise people will lean their head one way or the other. So I got this little thing that I can drop on it just to make sure that it's absolutely flat. The other thing I did is kind of cantilever the lens forward, the camera forward so that we. We have a minimum chance of seeing the Len. The. The legs. You. This is the problem you have is that, that, that you. That you see all the. Everything.

[Leo Laporte]

See everything, including.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So here you can see the legs there. Because this is the. This is what the camera is actually capturing. This is 210°.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So it's not matted. So if you go back to here, this is matted for this. And then you've got a little bit of play. And what's nice about that Is that, for instance, in this one, because it.

[Leo Laporte]

Gets soft at the edges, doesn't it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, and. And what I can do is I. I can make it. I can make it softer if I want to at the edges so that it kind of feels more like it's blended in. Here's all the channels in. In the, in the Scorpio. And then you can, you know, in. You can pull the file. What's kind of cool is that you have a. An Ethernet connection to the camera. So you can very quickly pull a small file over and pull it over and process it in resolve really quickly and just take a look at it and see, like, am I in the right place? Like, I noticed when I did this on set, oh, my camera's a little too high. If I'm sitting, I want it to be sitting a little bit lower. But it's hard to tell just looking at a flat image. Now, you do need some speed. That's a. That's an OWC Thunder Blade.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are nice. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, they, they promise six and a half gigabytes a second. I only got 6.55, but holy smokes, that is the fastest I've ever seen a drive work. So. So anyway, and that's an. And wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

They promised six and a half. You got six.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, no, they promised 6.6 and I got 6.55. You know, like, it was close. I know, I know. I'm just. I'm being fun. So the. So yeah, it's screaming fast drive. The. You can get up to about. If you did the lowest compression rating, which I didn't do, you can get up to about three gigs a second that you're pulling. So for me, it's about. To put it in perspective, it's about a terabyte every 12 to 15 minutes is what. What I'm. What. What this thing burns through. Wow. That's an M3 Ultra, the base unit, which I probably am going to send back and I bough. And then I going to send it back and buy a bigger one because the base unit is neither here nor there. It's too big and expensive to take on something.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the base unit? What are you talking about?

[Andy Ihnatko]

The M3 Ultra is what. You know, the one when you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the base model. I see, I see, I see.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, and what you really need is those processors. It uses all the GPU processors, like 97% when you're rendering. And so anyway, so I was able to kind of very quickly preview that. I also took it to this is a glass blower which was really cool. And the idea is you could kind of experience it so you can see him and you'll see that I kind of set it up and I'll push these somewhere. I haven't posted them yet. We're still color correcting stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you move the camera at all on this or.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're always locked in these two cases. I locked them off. I found out where they're going to go. Now we're going to. We're planning to do some more testing. So my brother has what's called a Trinity rig, an Arri Trinity rig. And we're gonna put the camera on. It's like a steady cam with a stabilizer on the top. And the stabilizer is really important because it'll keep the camera level all the time. And so he and I. He's coming up from a shoot on Thursday so we're gonna shoot that. There I am later or not today, but later today I'm gonna shoot a violinist, Todd Reynolds, who's a friend of mine. We're gonna shoot some with just him playing for the camera. And my. Tomorrow I'm going to shoot things that you probably shouldn't do with the camera. So I'm going to take the camera and lean it forward, put it in places that would make you uncomfortable. Do things, you know, like mounting on your head.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, like. Like just. Just lots of little things so that you get a sense of like what not to do or, or we can use it as examples for what's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you going to use. Create a kind of educational little.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm. I think I'm. I'm. I'm leaning on building a whole nother channel for it just for immersive. Because it's. Because. Well, the problem is I was talking to some YouTubers and they were like if you put it on your channel people get confused because you're to going got all this live stuff. So it'll probably be a different channel that's focused on this. In the next week or two I'm going to start posting a bunch of stuff and is there a way if.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a Vision Pro to watch a YouTube channel?

[Andy Ihnatko]

There's not an easy way to publish right now to this format. Obviously there's people working on it. I think Sandwich is working on it. Yeah, there's immersive Bliss and there's actually.

[Jason Snell]

A WWDC session about this where there are in Tahoe and all the other 26s including. Including Vision. You should be able to do, like, embed these things in web pages and stuff like that and snap into and stream it. Like, it's all, it's all on the way. Yeah, it's being real.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We're in the front edge of this and even now. And the thing that's crazy is that the amount of processing that's required, it processes fairly quickly. It's about a 2 or 3 to 1 when you're not putting noise reduction on. But a lot of times if you don't get it bright enough, they have a lot of great noise reduction. But it goes 10x, like 10x slower. Like, I had the little. I did two and a half minutes overnight and it was 12 hours to render that, you know, because I had to turn on some of that noise reduction. And so, so those are the kind of things that you. That I'm learning, you know, like you want to shoot a little, you know. And so I've only had it for a couple days, so I'm learning a lot about. About what you can and can't do or what you should do. And so we learned the second time to go a little bit brighter on, on. On everything that we're doing. It feels like you're overexposing the image, but it works out better.

[Jason Snell]

It looks great, Alex, because Alex sent me a couple of files to play earlier today. They look great.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The thing that I enjoy the most, which I sent you, which is the glass blowing.

[Jason Snell]

The glass blower.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. When he walks up to you. So if he was there the whole time, it would have been too much. It would be like, oh, but for him to be walking around. It looks great when he's walking. Remember, this is still half resolution. The rendering will get better. Better. He's walking around. It looks great. And then he walks right up in front of you and. And forms his glass and. And you have to kind of look up and look down and. And that kind of stuff to me is super exciting. You know, like, it's a. It's a really.

[Jason Snell]

You get a sense of his space. There are people walking around outside looking in the window, like, what's going on in there? That's pretty awesome because you, you know, you get that full kind of immersion of being in a space with him. Yeah, that was really good. And the, and the, the band again, live music performances are really great. I also really enjoyed again, you know, I watched the bass player play in detail. I watched the guitar player, I put the siding, watch the drummer. I sort of chose what to look at. At Various times. Watch the jewelry on the singer for a little while. There's a mirror behind them where I could see Alex's lights.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Which was.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like there was a three. Like a fisheye mirror.

[Jason Snell]

It's just. Yeah, it just happens to be there. I kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Keep on going. I need to take that down. But I never do. It's kind of a fun little.

[Leo Laporte]

There was in the Girl with the Pearl Earring.

[Jason Snell]

It's just.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an artistic.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It is. It is kind of a fun Easter egg that if you go up there and you zoom, zoom into that, you'll see, you know, what our setup looks like.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. I can see the lights in there. I will say something that. I don't know if you noticed this. You probably did because you're very detail oriented but on the periphery of the image. So like if I looked in the bottom right corner at the wall this. There's an outlet and the outlet does not look rectangular. It looks. You know, you can see on the edge of the image there's a little bit more distortion happening right at the borders. I thought that was interesting as a. Just a thing that I noticed. But only because it was a perfectly rectangular object that I know is supposed to be rectangular. And I assume that at Alex's studio or wherever this was that he doesn't have melted outlets.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It could be. Some of those outlets are a little complicated.

[Jason Snell]

This is really. But it's like it's some edge distortion happening at the very periphery of it. It's not a big deal. And only something that was a very rigid geometry would you even notice. But like it looked really good. And I love that this is like. I mean, this is Apple immersive content, basically. It looks like Apple immersive content fully. And for it to just be like Alex was like, yeah, I'm going to just here, Jason, look at this. It's amazing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I shot it 10 seconds after I had gotten the camera and then a couple. I mean, the next day I was looking at. Later that evening, I was looking at it. I have been doing this for a long time. Like video. At least 10 years just for immersive video and another 20 before that for immersive photos. And I can say that this is the first time I felt like I had a whole system, like a whole camera. It's sure I'm still learning a bunch of stuff, but it is the coolest camera that you know that I. I was afraid that I was going to be horribly disappointed. Like I was afraid that I'VE gotten so excited about this camera. It's going to show up and I'm going to be, you know, like, oh, it was okay and I was not disappointed. Like, it's a, it's a really incredible piece of hardware, you know, and so I only get it until Friday, but, but yeah, so I'm shooting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Here's the worst part.

[Leo Laporte]

You have one on order, right? You're going to get one Eventually.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Eventually I'm going to get one. I had to kind of figure out the, the money thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no. How much is it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's $32,000. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So I have to house for that I've bought.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean I, my 950 cost $82,000. And so it's not like I've never bought a camera that expensive. But, but I just want to do it exactly like I got to figure out what. And so, so I, I'm working on that part. But, but the, it is, but getting to have it for a little while and making sure that I. Part of it was I want to make sure I, I want it, you know, like, I was like, I'm going to spend $32,000 sight unseen on a, on a camera. I wanted to make sure that it did what I want. Now I'm going to go back and start collecting cash because I think that it's, it is a, it's really a groundbreaking piece of hardware, you know, and it is. And it's going to make, it's going to change. And the is thing. Thing that I got the shooting that little concert with the band, this is, you know, and shooting a glassblower and I'm going to shoot a violinist and then I'm going to go shoot some stuff in the woods. And I think that what's going. And everyone else is going to do the same thing. When people are buying this camera or renting the camera. The camera is so easy to use. You can rent it like this doesn't mean you have to, you don't have to go out and buy this camera. This camera is going to rent for probably, you know, $1,500 a day, you know, or $1,000 a day. And what, what you don't. You're not rent for us. That would usually be the beginning. Now I have to rent a lens. Now I have to rent all this other stuff. You do need a. I, I, you don't need a dock. But I have, I have, I'm borrowing the dock as well because it is pulling, you know, then you can pull the data off at 10 gigs a second, you know, so you pull the dock off and you put it in. It's like $1,600. It's not like a super expensive dock, but it just holds the drives and lets you let you do that. The memory modules are really great. So they're the. Anyway, the system, it's the most like production ready system. And when we set up for this, it took me about six hours to get set up for the band. But five and a half. Well, five hours to five and a half hours was setting up the other cameras, you know, all the other. Because we weren't sure if it was going to work. So I figured, well, I better have the. If the band comes up, I got to shoot something. So we had all these 12 Blackmagic 12Ks and 6Ks in there that are. So setting that all up and getting all working took way longer. When we went to the glass shop, I was shooting, you know, most of the time with him explaining what he was going to do and me figuring out what to do. And then I put the camera up in 15 minutes and was shooting. And. And I think that that's the thing. I'm not. And again, because it's immersive, I'm not trying to figure out. I'm going to shoot over your shoulder and then I'm gonna do a close up and then I'm gonna do this. No, I'm. You're gonna stand there as if you were standing there and you're gonna experience it. Now you could do that too. But I think that. I think that there's going to be so much content that starts to get created around experience experiencing the world. You know, like experiencing a glassblower or an artist experiencing a band experiencing a location. And we've never been able to do this easily. It's been an art project since I started, you know, crazy 3D prints for GoPro cameras and everything else. The Ozos, which were really still complicated to render. So it's pretty cool. So anyway, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It goes back to the 16th century and Jan Van Eck painting the. This couple with a parabolic mirror behind them so that you could see the artist. We've always wanted this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's pretty exciting. And also resolve 20.1, which is the one that can support this footage, just got released on Friday, I think, or last Thursday. So between the last Mac break and this break and then they have blackmagic already put footage up so you can download the software. Software and throw the footage in and play with it. And there's some step by step guides on how to get started and how to set up your resolve. And they've got the projects there too, so you can just open the project and play with it as well. Just note that you probably want to turn unless you're using the Most maxed out M3. Probably want to turn the project. Just turn the playback resolution down to a quarter. Start there, start there. It'll play back. You can edit it and it'll play back and so on and so forth. But full res and when you add the noise reduction is when it gets pretty interesting. So anyway, so these are big files. It's never been smoother. It's still a grown up production system which is that it's like big files and big storage. And I'm in the process of getting this 36 terabyte hard drive to just back stuff up and I realized I need a bigger boat.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, thank you for that first person report, which is good because the Vision Pro segment, otherwise there's going to be monkeys and your head vibrating in the AirPods. So I think this was the highlight of the Vision Pro.

[Jason Snell]

I look forward to seeing and reporting back on more. I feel like this is going to be a recurring little thing. It's Alex's adventure with this camera and I love that Alex. Alex is sending me things to watch as well.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really cool.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And Leo and Andy, I would send them to you too.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It really would be. I would just go think I feel sick.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, Jason, I'll keep on sending them to you.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And we'll send them out, we'll post things. I got to figure out where to put them publicly. But I know for folks, when we're starting to do these, I'll start putting things somewhere.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And there's a way, like I said, there's that session you might want to check out. But there's a way to embed spatial content in the web for 26 that will. Because first off, if you've got a Vision Pro, you should probably be on the developer beta because what are you doing? Why not? And then that opens up a bunch of stuff where you can host stuff. And literally Alex emailed it to a web link that I downloaded the file and then I just airdropped it to my Vision Pro and it played. It's not complicated.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I will say that the concern I have mostly is the file size.

[Jason Snell]

They're enormous.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So I have to figure out how to post it in a way that the little file is two and a half minutes that I sent you is still five or six gigs. I got people jump onto it a.

[Jason Snell]

Three minute long clip of that band and it was 7.5 gigs.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And well, and I admit that it was probably less compressed than it. That's not what they suggest for a preview. But I, I like it to be less look.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well it was a good sample. So there is that. Yeah. What we want is YouTube for this or perhaps actually YouTube for this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it'd be hard to get YouTube to do for this vertical market. But I do think there's going to be a market for someone who is. I think at first it'll probably be curated but I think that having a place that they start looking for and there's again, I think that there's a bunch of folks thinking about this pretty hard. I think that being able to easily post it somewhere for people to watch is going to be coming soon. Probably this fall.

[Leo Laporte]

Should I wrap it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Close the parentheses.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Vision Pro segment.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Now you see.

[Jason Snell]

Now you know we're done talking.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The Vision Pro. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Our picks of the week are just around the corner. If you're not yet a club TWIP member, I'd like to invite you to join the club. 25% of our operating expenses come now from the club and that's fantastic. I'm just very gratified. It means that you support what we do, but not everybody's a member. In fact, it's only a couple of percent of the total audience. So joined. And so I would like to get more of you involved. It gives you a stake in what we're doing. I think that's pretty important. And we give you benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this plug. You'd also get access to the club Twit Discord, which is kind of the best social network ever. Smart people talking about interesting things to geeks. Not just our shows, but there's sections for every possible geek subject. There's also a lot of special content that we do. Last week we did Stacy's Book Club. On Friday we also did the Chris Markwart photo segment. That was fantastic. We have Game night coming up. This is new. They just added this August 15th, which is Friday, 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern. Producers Anthony Easton and John Ashley are going to go. What is this, John? A co op climbing adventure.

[Jason Snell]

It is literally a game where you have to work together to climb the.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Top of a mountain peak.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be fun.

[Jason Snell]

Can others play if you want to join us?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe Leo, you can have more than just a couple of people playing. Maybe I will. Maybe I will. That's very intriguing. We also record shows in the club. The Made by Google keynote for the pixel 10. All the keynotes I should mention now thanks to takedown requests by a certain frequent fruit company are done exclusively in the club. So if you are in the club and you care about that, you know, wanting to see our reaction to these keynotes from all the big companies, that's another reason to join the club. This is my favorite. Micah's crafting corner. August 20th. Micah's gonna build some more Lego plants. I'm gonna sew. I have a bunch of my shirts are missing buttons and I have two different ways of putting buttons on. We're gonna do A because you know, I'm used to doing tests. We will talk about G and nathan in the AI user group September 5th. I want to talk more also about local AIs because that's the latest kick I'm on. And if you want to participate in our D and D one shot adventure. Micah wants to be a dungeon master for a one shot adventure. But he has a poll up. This won't be till next year, but he has a poll up now about who should be involved in this. And if you're a club member, you get get to cast your votes. But you only have three more days.

[Jason Snell]

Please, just a quick little programming though that's not exactly an extra.

[Leo Laporte]

Just ignore the dates.

[Jason Snell]

Just a place.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a made update. It'll be whenever Micah decides. Which probably be sooner than later I would guess. Anyway, lots of fun in the club. We love the club. I hope you will love it too. Find out. There's a two week trial so you can do it, you know, see if you like it. There are family memberships and corporate memberships. Memberships. But the individual membership. 10 bucks a month, $120 a year. All at Twit TV Club. Twit. We would really like to have you in the club. It's a great way for to support the content we do here. Now if you don't like the content, don't join the club. But I'm assuming if you join the club, that's a vote of confidence.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or join the club just out of spite.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just screw us wagon.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, just a screw.

[Leo Laporte]

Screw with us. Do that. Andy and Iko, your pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

One of the most beautiful Macs that ever Mac that Apple ever made was the 2002, 2003 iMac G4. That was the one where the screen was on a chrome. Yeah, right, right, right behind Jason there where the screen was like on this beautiful chrome handle. You could tilt and pivot it and the base was this beautiful like half dome of white with the Apple logo on it. It's so cool that it has one of the. It's one of the few, few Macs that I've kept in my office because it's just too. I don't use it, but it's too beautiful not to have. A company, however, has created a replacement for the logic board that makes it into something very, very cool. You just do a logic board swap and suddenly you can use your G4IMAC as an external display for whatever computer you're plugging it into. Ideally, I suppose it would be a Mac mini, but it doesn't matter. It's not only that, but the board itself also has USB on it. It also has audio on it. So you can basically plug your imac's keyboard into it, plug the mouse into the back of it. So essentially you've got this Shadow Mac Running M1, M4, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the display resolution? Is it a decent display?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's okay. It's like 1440 by. I think it's HD. It's HD, but it' not great. So maybe you'd want to have this as like a second display or just.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's cool to. I mean like Jason could put this in there and now his dead Mac could do something.

[Jason Snell]

Except mine works. But yes, if mine didn't work, I would totally do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or use it as a media center. Use it as something else like that. I mean, it's too good a machine not to be actually doing something with it. The upgrade looks like it's really, really easy, the G4. It's really easy to get the logic board and I don't have it myself, of course, but it says that essentially you just unplug the current logic board, plug in this new board and you're good to go. One bad note is that unfortunately I've got the original 15 inch and the 15 inch is the only one that it's not compatible with. It only works with the 17 inch or the. Yeah, or the, the 20 inch, but it works with absolutely everything also. I mean, they've really thought it out. It also works with. They have brightness controls, a fan, it will automatically go to sleep, just like a regular display. It's Pretty darn nice. It's not that expensive. It's in Australia so you might take a while for it to ship over. But it's about $250 I believe. You can add a couple upgrades with cables and stuff like that, but 250 bucks. They also make a board for like the 2011 iMac, you know, the standard like panel one that adds some extra goodies where it'll even like tap into the built in. The built in webcam and the internal speakers. The problem is that cracking open like a 2011 imac is you need the suction cups, you need to release the heat, you need to release adhesives to cut to get the, get the screen off. But the, the, the original iMac G4 however, looks like it's pretty easy. Very, very, very tempting. I very much approve of this kind of incentive to create things. I mean if you look around there are also people who are trying, who are figuring out how to put an M1 board into the thing that seems a bit extreme. Like that's not just simply a board swap. And also you're still stuck with that not really great panel as your work panel. But if I had a larger display imac, I would be very, very tempted to get this just so I can. If I were just having like a slideshow of G4IMAC desktops, it would be worth 250 bucks for me.

[Jason Snell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Dare I ask Alex what his pick of the week is? I suspect it's a 50. Alex.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I don't think that I need to belabor it too much, but my pick for this week seems obvious. The blackmagic immersive camera. So I think that that's the pretty, pretty nifty if you, you're. If you've thought that this was something you wanted to go down the path of. It's. It's expensive. It's not like a, it's not going to cost. It's not the same as a mouse but, but it is a. It's. It's. I think it's a game changing machine. So pretty excited about it.

[Leo Laporte]

And only 50 Alexes. So only 50 such a deal.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

See, it sounds so, so much smaller when you say it that way.

[Alex Lindsay]

Only housing expenses for an entire year.

[Jason Snell]

But after that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but, but after you finally can move back into an actual house or apartment.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But you can.

[Leo Laporte]

It's worth living in a tent for Andy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But there's so much outside under the bridge that you can shoot every moment.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of your living in the, in a, in a nature preserve.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Series there somewhere of like just a presents every day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just like here I am in the box truck.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I'm going to go back to an old favorite, an app that hasn't been the pick of the week since like the very early days of MacBook. I love this.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going back into the archives, but.

[Jason Snell]

There'S a reason for it. So I am picking Instapaper, which still exists, still around. So it went from Marco Arment to I want to say automatic and then it got bought out and spun out. And so it is again basically an indie developer project. But that's good because if you're somebody like, like Pocket that set up a whole company to do a read a latest service and then goes out of business, but Instapaper is still there, you can use it for free. There's a premium that will keep it running and gives you a bunch of.

[Leo Laporte]

Extra features for 60 bucks.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's still there.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't posted anything since 2013.

[Jason Snell]

It'll import from any pretty much any other Read it later service, which is very nice. And the reason that it's relevant right now and that why I've been getting back into to Instapaper is with the dissolution of Pocket came the dissolution of the one way to get articles onto Kobo E Readers because their integration for Read it later was Pocket. So it sounds like maybe the developer of Instapaper actually approached Kobo and said we can replace Pocket on your devices. And I think last month they made an announcement that Insert Paper and Kobo were working together and that by the end of the summer I think they will have a software update that will enable Instapaper on Kobo. So you'll be able to find an article you want to read, click one button, it sends it to Instapaper and your Kobo syncs with Instapaper to give you those articles on your E ink reader instead. Which is great. I used the Pocket feature. That's the only thing I used Pocket for, honestly was that. But I've been in the run up to this. I got back into Instapaper and I set it up and I'm really looking to forward forward to having Instapaper be auto synced to my Kobo so I can read those articles there in a more pleasant form of an E reader. So Instapaper, check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Do you use Readwise for your Kobo?

[Jason Snell]

No, the Kobo only has support directly.

[Leo Laporte]

For Reading will get Kobo Highlights. So I like to read the books in Kobo Highlights. Highlight it. Ah. And then it goes to Read Wise. But I think it's one way. Yeah, I don't think.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it goes the other way. And I, I haven't done that. I tried Read Wise and it just doesn't work the way that I work. I, I, I, you know, I like the idea of it a lot. I paid for it for a couple of months. It's really interesting, that idea of, of being able to gather your highlights and.

[Leo Laporte]

And summarize and then it works at Kobo to Read Wise to Obsidian works. So and I use Obsidian basically as my Insta Paper. I use the Obsidian web clipper to put articles into.

[Jason Snell]

Makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

So now I do have a centralized place for all of that stuff, but it's a little bit more complicated. It'll be when they, if they, if you want to go to premium, I might because I still have my instant paper account. 599amonth, 59.99 a year. And when they add that Kobo integration, I will definitely do it because that's a good feature. I like that.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Thanks for the reminder. I forgot that I haven't backed up. I haven't exported all my stuff out of Pocket yet. We have until the first week in October, October to do so. And yeah, Instapaper is one of the services you can export to, so.

[Jason Snell]

Nice. Yeah. And, and it's their work and they, in fact they offer very smartly, I would say discount for the first year premium for people coming from Pocket. So you get for $45 for the first year if you want to do premium on Instapaper and try it out for a year for a little bit of a discount. And then yeah, the, the Kobo Instapaper deal, they say by the end of the summer, so that's not too long now, like, so probably in the next month, presumably there'll be a Kobo software update that will come out that will just swap because it currently shows Pocket and it will swap that out. For instance, paper. I wish Kobo would have an email gateway like Amazon does for Kindle, because that's the one thing that I kind of wish I could do more in a more automated fashion is it would be kind of great if I could send a bunch of my newsletters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I used to do that directly.

[Jason Snell]

Into, into my E reader. I mean, the dream is that an E reader, one of these E readers, ought to build in an RSS reader of some sort. That would be really sweet. There are Android based E readers where they have Play Store support where you can use RSS apps on Android. It's not ideal. They're really not made for E Ink. You really kind of would need somebody like Kindle or Kobo to do that. But like it's never going to happen because these are both platforms that still consider their web browsers except experimental. Like, like a couple decades after starting their product category.

[Leo Laporte]

So isn't it funny? It's. You sure you want to go into the beta? Experimental.

[Jason Snell]

Experimental browser. It's like the experimental browser is like 15 years old now. But anyway. But this is a really great way if you're. If you've got long form articles that you want to read. E Ink is a great place to just do focused reading. And so this is a good way to put those together. Plus if you want to read a later service, even for free. Instapaper is nice. It's nice and an indie developer. It was the original and again not run by a giant corporation that is going to try to extract a lot of value from you. It's just a guy who does Instapaper and pay for the premium service. If you want it to continue, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

And thanks for reminding me Andy, to export it. My pocket. Whoops, I forgot. I can do that. Well, that's it for MacBreak Weekly. Thank you everybody for joining us. We as I mentioned, do the show Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. Watch it live. But you don't have to. You can get a copy of the show audio or video or Both@Twitt TV MBW. There is of course a YouTube channel dedicated to it. Best way though, subscribe on your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. And if you see an option to review it, please give us the best possible 5 stars, 18 paper clips, whatever it is, review. We appreciate it. It helps spread the word about when's the show's been around for 20 years, it stops making it to the top of the charts and all of that stuff. So spread the word. It is still the best damn Vision Pro podcast in the world.

[Jason Snell]

We proved that today.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, Alex Lindsay is at Officehours Global every morning. You can find out more at Officehours Global or watch it on YouTube. He works at 090 Media. If you want to hire the best darn streaming event producer in the world. This company does it all. Anything you want to plug. Is Gray Matter back yet or are you still Summer? We're still.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We're still. We're going to we're going to take the summer siesta, so. So we're going to start up in September.

[Leo Laporte]

So nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It'll be coming back to Substack.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll give you a plug then. Yeah, Andy and Ako love to see you. Don't go. Have a Cinnabon and screw the library policy. Live it up. You know what I'm saying?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I don't deserve a Cinnabon, but I will get one of those Hostess Honey Buns. You can get the convenience store, I think. I believe I've earned a Hostess Honey Bun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a somalacrum of the Cinnabon. Yes, I will agree. Thank you, Andrew, for being here. And of course, Jason Snell, who is a busy [e-mail] his [e-mail] Jason, anything you want to report? Mike's back right from as a maternity.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yeah, Mike's back. We're talking on Mondays on Upgrade and you know, playing, I don't know, playing D and D on Total Party Kill. And the Incomparable is doing a bunch of stuff this summer. We just posted an episode where we drafted our favorite superhero movies, which is a really fun premise. And Andy's on that episode, so, oh, how fun. Tune in for that one on the Incomparable.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you all for joining us. We appreciate all your support. You're listening to the show. You're watching the show. Your comments in the chat. Thank you to all of you. We'll see you next time. But now I'm sad to say, it is my solemn duty to tell you you gotta get back to work because break time is over. The tech world moves fast and you need to keep up for your business, for your life. The best way to do that Twit tv On this Week in Tech, I bring together tech's best and brightest minds to help you understand what just happened and prepare. Prepare for what's happening next. It's your first podcast of the week and the last word in tech. Cybersecurity experts know they can't miss a minute of security now every week with Steve Gibson, what you don't know could really hurt your business. But there's nothing Steve Gibson doesn't know. Tune in security now every Wednesday. Every Thursday, industry expert Micah Sargent brings you interviews with tech journalists who make or break break the top stories of the week on Tech News Weekly. And if you use Apple products, you won't want to miss the premier Apple podcast, Now in its 20th year, Mac break Weekly. Then there's Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. They are the best connected journalists covering Microsoft and every week they bring you their insight and wit on Windows Weekly. Build your tech intelligence weekly after week with the best in the business. Your seat at Tech's most entertaining and informative table is waiting at TWiT TV. Subscribe now.