MBW 1034: The Other Side of the Corn - Price Hike for Apple Music

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 1034 Summary: "The Other Side of the Corn"

Date: July 22, 2026
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jason Snell, Christina Warren, Andy Ihnatko
Main Theme: Price Hikes for Apple Music & Apple Services, Legal Skirmishes, and Apple's AI Developments

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Episode Overview

This episode of MacBreak Weekly dives into Apple’s latest service price increases—most notably Apple Music and Apple One—and the broader industry context. The hosts debate whether the hikes are due to legitimate costs or corporate greed, comparing Apple to other tech giants. They also tackle fresh legal news: Apple’s Section 230 win over CSAM liability, OpenAI lawsuit chess moves, and Apple's strategy for AI/features in China amid regulatory complications. The episode concludes with discussions around App Store quality control, booming AI-generated apps, and community listener picks.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Apple Music & Services Price Hikes

Start: 04:43

• Apple One and Apple Music prices are increasing (~$1–$3 more/month depending on the plan).
• Jason Snell notes Premiere started at $29.95 in 2020, now up to nearly $40—a 33%+ increase.
• Christina Warren describes how bundling still makes sense but questions whether it's still a "good deal":
  • “Is it still better to get the bundle than to buy the things individually? Yes... Is it a good deal? That is hard. Everybody’s gonna have to make that question for themselves.” [06:16]
• The panel relates this to industry trends (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix all raising prices) and inflation.
• Christina emphasizes the unique pushback on Apple, given its $5 trillion valuation:
  • “...when a company gets to this size...do you really need an extra dollar a month for Apple Music from me, really?” [09:44]
• The group encourages consumers to re-evaluate subscriptions, especially since Apple’s services, while integrated, aren’t always best-in-class.

2. Legal News: Section 230 & CSAM Lawsuit

Start: 24:43

• Apple’s $32.8B privacy class action, accusing them of "privacy washing" and failing to scan iCloud for CSAM, has been dismissed.
• Section 230 continues to shield Apple and others; the judge called for legislative action if policy changes are needed.
• Jason and Christina warn that demands to weaken 230, often under the pretense of fighting CSAM, usually mask broader attempts to control speech:
  • “They are using the worst thing you can imagine because all sorts of interests want to use this... They want to put cracks in section 230... to control speech...” —Jason [27:12]
• Christina reflects concern about automated scanning:
  • “I was very upset when...Apple introduced plans...to automatically scan your iCloud for CSAM…I was very heartened when they pulled back...” [29:09]

3. DOJ Antitrust Case & Apple’s Legal Muscle

Start: 33:27

• DOJ’s antitrust case (about Apple’s smartphone “monopoly”) appears headed for settlement.
• Discussion centers on the contrast between Apple’s immense legal resources and regulatory bodies’ limited reach.
• Andy observes:
  • “There are two sides to every corn…” [37:04] (a running joke after a slip of the tongue).

4. AI and Apple: China, OpenAI, and Local Models

Start: 59:36, 65:28, 79:05

• Apple is working with Alibaba (Quen model) for AI in China, not Gemini or its own US models due to regulatory restrictions.
• Debate about how “Apple Intelligence” will be customized for each region—and the developer and privacy implications.
• Discussion wanders into whether Chinese AI models simply "distill" Western ones or represent legitimate engineering achievement.
  • “I think that’s a very American-centric and BS point of view…What Moonshot has done with very limited resources…comes down to great engineering, not distillation.” —Leo [74:45]
• New startup Prism ML’s "Bonsai" LLM is small enough to run on iPhone, showing the rapid democratization and hardware efficiency gains in AI tech.
• Christina and Leo deep-dive on quantization, mixture-of-experts, and local model deployment on Mac hardware.

5. App Store Quality, Vibe-Coding, and Spam

Start: 90:54, 107:35, 116:49

• AI-vibe-coded apps are flooding the App Store, doubling new apps year-over-year.
• Many are simple, niche, or low-quality; Apple’s review process and search/discovery are struggling to keep up.
• Jason suggests Apple should see this as a growth opportunity but must improve approval, search, and in-app purchase tooling.
  • “They need to do more work on App Store approvals, they need to do more work on search and discovery…and these systems are not very good.” [112:26]
• The team criticizes fraudulent or malicious apps that slip past review—particularly gambling and "nudify" apps targeting Brazilian and San Francisco users—and call for better enforcement (the “bunko squad” approach).
• Andy:
  • “They have a holistic fundamental problem with the, with app reviews that they absolutely need to address…they clearly have not decided [it’s a priority].”
• Apple and Google both warned over abuse of face-swap/deepfake apps; hosts note inconsistency in enforcement.

6. Notable “Fun” Segments: Event Commentary

Start: 00:58 & scattered throughout

• Extended playful banter on the World Cup halftime show—Ted Lasso, Coach Beard, Shakira—and the oddities of American pop culture exported globally.
• A running joke on identifying celebrities (Brad Pitt vs. Matt Damon), and nostalgia for classic TV like Columbo and The Prisoner.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Do you really need an extra dollar a month for Apple Music from me, really?” —Christina Warren [09:44]
• “There are two sides to every corn.” —Andy Ihnatko [37:04] (and later callbacks)
• “They want to put cracks in section 230 so...they can control speech on the Internet…” —Jason Snell [27:12]
• “If you go to the official Apple sports app, they have DraftKings stuff right in there...Apple is not. This is one of the few areas I feel is absolutely unethical.” —Andy Ihnatko [121:10]
• “You can’t have it both ways.” —Jason & Christina on Apple’s curation claims [118:59–119:03]
• “This is an opportunity for Apple, but…they’re going to have to step up…they need to do more work on App Store approvals…” —Jason Snell [112:26]
• “Developers are their customers as well... they should be treated a lot better than they’re being treated.” —Andy Ihnatko [116:49]

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Important Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------|--------------------| | Apple Music/Services Price Discussion | 04:43–14:40 | | Section 230/CSAM Legal Case | 24:43–33:27 | | DOJ Antitrust Settlement | 33:27–37:06 | | Replaceable Batteries, EU Law | 37:25–44:24 | | Hide My Email Lawsuit | 45:17–50:52 | | OpenAI / Apple Lawyer Letters | 59:36–64:33 | | AI in China (Apple Intelligence, Alibaba) | 65:28–71:22 | | Chinese v. US AI Models, Hardware | 73:47–79:05 | | On-Device AI Quantization Conversation | 80:15–88:01 | | App Store & Vibe-Coding Boom | 90:54–116:49 | | App Store Fraud (Brazil, Gambling, Nudify) | 116:49–125:10 | | Picks of the Week | 127:57–140:49 |

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Picks of the Week Highlights

• Jason: Breville One Touch Tea Maker—automatic scheduling for perfect tea every morning.
• Christina: Native (native without an "e")—open-source app for running local LLMs on Mac, powered by MLX.
• Andy:
  • Classic David Bowie/NASA logo MacBook sticker
  • Dbrand MacBook Skins for easy, colorful customization.

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Tone, Style, and Show Vibe

• Typical MacBreak Weekly: knowledgeably irreverent, witty, and full of personal asides.
• The panel blends detailed technical analysis (especially around AI and quantization) with accessible analogies.
• They balance critical consumer advocacy with understanding of business realities, always with a sense of humor.

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Final Thoughts

A jam-packed episode covering Apple’s latest service pricing moves in-depth, set against inflation and competitive pressure. The hosts urge listeners to be discerning about their subscriptions, criticize Apple’s inconsistent App Store policing, and break down the complexities of global AI regulatory landscapes. The show closes as always with gadget and software picks—and a reminder to revisit your own tech and service budgets as Apple (and the world) keeps moving the goalposts.

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Christina, Jason are here. We're glad you're here, too. Coming up, we're going to talk about Apple's price hikes. It's not just hardware anymore. Is it greed? The OpenAI battle continues on with lawyer letters. And China gets Siri AI. Or does it? That's coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 1034, recorded Tuesday, July 21, 2026. The Other side of the Corn. It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Hello, you Mac maniacs. This is the show. We cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell from six colors.com. hello, Jason Snell. How are you?

[B]

Good to be here. Yes.

[A]

Did you enjoy the World cup halftime show of 27 minutes?

[B]

Oh, did I. I mean, Apple TV's own Ted Lasso was there, so.

[A]

Oh, my God. We'll talk about that. Christina Warren's also here. She is Dev Rell at GitHub. And we're talking before the show about the local AI and doing all this stuff and then having so much fun. Also, Mr. Andrew Inotko. He's in the library. Good to see you, Andy.

[B]

Hey there.

[C]

Heather Ho there.

[A]

How you doing, everybody?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Ted Lasso and his pal. I don't. What's his name? The guy with the beard.

[B]

Coach Beard.

[A]

Coach Beard Hunt.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Easy to remember. Coach Beard were just kind of walking.

[B]

They did a walk and talk and walk and talk and then intro Justin Bieber. Yeah.

[A]

Which was wild. And then they turn around the substitution sign and it says Belieber. Belieber Belieb.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

And the world soccer press thought that was all wonderful.

[A]

They loved it. They hate it.

[C]

They said that every four years we should do something exactly like that.

[B]

They were offended that we did a Super bowl halftime show in America for the World cup halftime, but it wasn't

[A]

even as good as Super Bowl. I mean, if they could pick one of those artists and like, Shakira would have been great for 27 minutes.

[D]

Or Madonna. Right. Like, I mean, Madonna.

[A]

I was blown away when she comes. Coming. I didn't like. I hate it when they do the pre tape. The Weeknd did that too, in his super bowl where they record a whole bunch of stuff and then emerge out of the field. I don't like that so much, but it was great to see all of those.

[C]

There's nothing wrong with this, but it was kind of like, remember when Letterman hosted the Oscars and he decided to do A stupid pet trick segment. It's like this. This isn't that. You don't have to take that from this and put it here. It's like respect what you're, you know, something belong.

[D]

Which is true, but. But at the same time, if you're going to have the. The World cup in America, I don't know, I feel like we should be gauche and American. And that means we're gonna. And that means we're gonna put on a Super bowl halftime show at what that means. Like, I. I don't disagree. It's maybe not time or place, but also, what's more American than having a Canadian? Shakira is from South America, I think. And. And Madonna's American at least, right? So at least we got a couple, you know.

[C]

Not according to her accent.

[D]

No. It was very fun.

[C]

Yeah, it was fun.

[A]

The game was amazing. If you're a fan of the Spanish form of soccer, which was quite, quite beautiful. Their passes are amazingly accurate. But didn't really. Argentina didn't enjoy it too much. I hope I'm not spoiling anything. Anyway, on we go with the show, we like to begin the show with something totally unrelated. Wait, wait a minute. There was Ted Lasso. That counts.

[B]

Exactly. See, I was tying it in to Apple's show, which is Ted Lasso and Coach Beard were there. And that's a great. You can't buy that kind of promotion for your Ted Lasso returning in August to Apple tv, by the way.

[D]

So also Apple tv, where you can watch Major League Soccer or whatever, right?

[B]

Indeed, indeed. I think that you could see all those connections happening there.

[A]

It's kind of amazing that Tim Cook didn't show up. I mean, usually he shows up at those things just to be there.

[B]

Maybe he was there. They're too busy taking pictures of Matt Damon and misidentifying as Brad Pitt. Yeah, sorry.

[A]

That was pretty funny.

[D]

That was very funny.

[A]

Brad Pitt. I don't think so.

[B]

The one. Well, yeah, clearly that announcer got handed a card that said Brad Pitt. And then he was. That's not Brad Pitt, actually. That's Matt Damon. I saw a very funny social media post that showed him with the woman, the lovely woman he was with. And the post just said, that's not Penelope.

[A]

Ah, nice. I like it.

[B]

What that's about. Yeah.

[A]

So we like to start with cheerful news, because the bad news is Apple is raising prices not just on hardware, but on software as well, services. In fact, Apple Music and Apple One subscriptions will go up. Apple Music's plan up a buck to $11.99 a month. Apple One bundles up. Now, I'm an Apple One subscriber. I have the family plan, which has gone up three bucks to $20. Individual plans 10.99 to $11.99 student only $5.99 to $6.99. Oh, I'm sorry, that was Apple Music. Apple Family, I was dreaming. Is $27.95 up a couple of bucks. Individuals not changing. Maybe I have Premiere. I don't even know what I have.

[D]

Yeah, Premiere is family, but you also get more space. So it's like you get the cloud plus you get the cloud plus you get. You get two terabytes, and then you get the family subscriptions for all the other services. So, like, I don't use Apple Fitness and I don't think it's a good product and I don't like Apple News. But do I have both of those things? Yes, I do.

[A]

Me too.

[D]

Because. Because when I priced it out and now I think it would still fit. It'd be like if I got Apple Music Subscript, like, like family, which I, you know, get to share with my family. If I got like the. The cloud to be able to share my icloud storage with my parents. Those two things alone and, you know, I guess like Apple Arcade or whatever, like, it would wind up being cheaper to just get all of them. So.

[A]

Yeah. So that's the question with the price hike. Is it still.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

A good deal?

[D]

I mean, good deal. I think that's a different question. Is it. Is it still better to get the bundle than to buy the things individually? Yes. Is it a good deal? I think that is hard. Everybody's gonna have to make that question for themselves because what gets me about this and like, price hikes, they are what they are. But when I look at like 39. 95amonth, which is fine. That, that. Right. That we're talking basically $500 a year. Which. Fine, whatever. But when they introduced Apple from Apple one, Premiere or whatever, I'm pretty sure that it was like low $30 a month. Or maybe it was 3,195amonth. I don't remember what it was, but it certainly. It's gone up at least two times since. Since then. I think this is the third price hike. So at this point you're going from like, okay, well, I used to budget $360 a year. Now I'm having to budget $480 a year. That's. That. That sucks.

[A]

Nine to five. Did the math. If you bought those services separately, be $73 instead of $40.

[D]

Sure.

[A]

Want Fitness plus and News?

[D]

Well, I was just going to say the only reason, the only reason I get those is because they're bundled with it. Right. I, I really only want the, the, the storage.

[A]

I would want tv, IV plus and music.

[D]

Right, right.

[B]

Premiere is. But by the way, Premiere started at I think $29.95 in 2020 when they introduced it. So six years later, it's basically $10 more.

[D]

Okay, so it's gone up 50% in price, which is not insignificant.

[A]

Yeah. Do you think Apple's spending more? Is this a price hike created by additional costs?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, license content is going up. Like everyone's, everyone's raising prices at least a dollar or two, but. And it also.

[A]

Coach Beard don't come cheap, my friends.

[C]

That's true. Jason Sudeikis could basically ask. Actually, not. Actually, maybe not so much anymore because he's no longer like the one huge, huge, huge hearts and minds show on the network anymore. But you're right, it's easy to jump on them for this. But Spotify has go up. YouTube Premium has gone up pretty much everything. But that said, I'm you. You do have to worry if it's like, we think that we're undercharging for this. We think that if we over the next two or three years issue two or three $1 price hikes, we can get this all the way up to 16 or 17 bucks a month and then we will wait to see. We will, we will terminate this plan as soon as we see that it is costing us in renewals and new signups.

[D]

It.

[A]

So some have said it makes sense for the hardware to go up. Apple's paying more, but it's pure greed for services to go up because Apple's probably not paying more.

[C]

Yeah. Especially since, like also AppleCare plus has also gotten a price increase and it's like, okay, so basically you're saying that because it's going to cost, the hardware that we might have to replace your motherboard with is going to cost us more because of the storage and the ram. We need to increase the cost of Apple Care Plus. Yeah. I mean, there's a. I wonder if there's an argument inside of Cupertino that, look, let's just rip off all of these band aids at once. Like, I know, I know it's not going to be one big band aid, but if we can just basically put all these through in the same month, it won't Seem as though we're constantly chiseling our users, no matter what the explanation is. But if not, that's really, really bad timing. If Apple gets associated with. Well, we're just basically,

[B]

I think that's

[C]

the cost, come to think of it, of being now nearly a $5 trillion company. That is, even if they have very legitimate reasons to raise prices like this, you're always going to have people like me, jerks, saying you're a $5 trillion company. Do you really need an extra dollar a month for Apple Music from me, really?

[B]

I mean, I hear that, but also, all prices are up.

[C]

Yeah, of course.

[B]

And all expenses are up. Their servers are up. The people they're going to have to. The people who work for them, who do Apple fitness have to buy groceries and those prices are up and their cost of living is going up. So that they're probably asking for raises. And like, they're not getting them, though.

[D]

Come on. They're not getting any raises.

[B]

Maybe they are.

[D]

You know, they're not. Like, like, like, I fully agree with you.

[B]

They don't, they don't give raises to their employees at Apple. Yes. You got. Come on. I mean, this is the world that we're in. So you can single them out if you want to. I think it's not realistic to do that because this is where we are is everything is going up in price. It's not like Apple is sitting there twisting the dial and everybody else is like, no, no, no, we're holding it down. In fact, you could argue that Apple held it down for a long time, but they're not going to do it anymore.

[C]

Yeah. All I'm saying is that again, this is part of the cost of being a $5 trillion company that you're not willing to. With a lesser company, you might say, well, okay, I guess it sucks, but okay, whatever. I think that that's, that's the sort of like, pushback that people will give when a company gets to this size because they didn't get to that size by saying, oh, well, gosh, we don't want to. We don't want to charge our consumers any more than we absolutely need to. Was like, yeah, you know what? They're not two hippies in a garage. They are going to do what they have to do. Yeah, it's a worth. Yeah, it's a worthwhile question to ask. Even though as I, as you make some good points that everything is going up. But again, it's just, again, another band aid is after the past two or three band AIDS get ripped off. I'm losing hair on my legs right now because of all the band aids are being ripped.

[B]

I get it. But it's happening everywhere. And I guess the other thing I would say is do we really expect that a giant profit making company is going to be the one that says, no, not us, everyone else, but. And the fact is they kind of did that with their hardware for quite a while and then they finally were like, all right, we can't do this anymore.

[D]

Well, the only thing I'll say is, and I agree with you largely, Jason, although tech companies are not actually giving raises right now and so everyone's incomes are staying stagnant and prices are going up. So like we shouldn't pretend like this is in any way going to be impacting, like especially their hourly employees. But like putting that aside, yeah, I don't expect them to keep their prices constant when all their competitors are raising them. Having said that, I think that as a consumer, when this happens, this gives you the opportunity to evaluate what value do I get out of this service. And for some people that means, yes, the $40 a month or whatever I'm paying for AppleCare or these things are worth it. Now for other people that might be looking at how much do I really use Apple music, how much do I use Apple tv, how much do I use Arcade? Can I get storage from someone else that maybe I like better? Because my argument with, with Apple, you know, one, to be honest with you, has been that in my opinion, even if you are fully in the Apple ecosystem, and I am, I don't think that any of those services are best in class at all. There are better videos, there are better video services, there are better cloud services, there are better music services, there are better news products, there are better things you can get individually. The value is that the tight integration, the vertical integration between your Apple products, which is good, and just kind of the ease of having one thing to do it. All that said, if your prices are continuing to go up, and in this case, like when my, again, like my Apple Premiere, one plan has gone up 50% in six years, which is a lot. Now a lot of other services have gone up that much too. But I think with any of that happens, that gives the consumer a time to evaluate not just Apple, but anybody and say, is there another service or is there something else that I could be buying that I like better? Is this still a good value for me? And that I think is the question not are they right to do it or not? Because obviously, yes, Everyone is raising prices, and that doesn't make Apple unique. And I don't think that they should have to suffer just because they're such a $5 trillion company. But I think as consumers, we do still have the right to say, is this still the best use of my money? Especially when the economy and everything else is hard and when things are tight?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And that goes for every service from every company. And just as a correction, you and I are on the same Apple One plan. It went up by 33%, not 50%.

[D]

Okay, okay.

[B]

It's 10 more above the original 30.

[D]

Okay, well, my correction. Excuse me, it went up a third regardless. A third in six years is a lot.

[B]

And my Netflix is up and my Spotify is up and everything else is up, too.

[D]

And that's why I said this is the opportunity not just for. To evaluate Apple, but any company. And I think that's what this is. When this happens, you should evaluate all of your services from all of your providers and say, is this still valuable to me?

[C]

Yeah, I think. I think that. Christina, that was. That was a good question that we've been asking ourselves for the past two or three years. Like, so I bought. So as you know, I bought a new MacBook, which means that now I get all of these services for free for three, three months, as long as I remember to cancel before they start charging me for them. And so this is my first time back on Apple tv. This is my first time back on Apple Music. This is my first time back on a lot of these services. And I don't think they're terrible, but they're not standouts to me. Like, every day now that I get to. After. After a long pause of access to this stuff, it's like, wow, why did I ever drop this? It was like, well, you dropped it because you were on Spotify before Apple Music, and Apple Music just wasn't a compelling alternative. Despite the fact that you've got so many. Despite the fact that the Apple Music app on Android is first class on. On the platform. There's just nothing about. And I can kind of go that way, all the way down the list. And Jason is also right. I mean, this is also the reason why last year, the year before, I did have to go through all of my subscriptions. And it wasn't that I don't have. Don't necessarily have like $13 for Hulu as opposed to $10 when I. When I might have first signed up. It's that. That's that extra dollar at that last price. Increase makes you look at this and say, why do you, why do you subscribe to Hulu? And for me the answer was always Bob's Burgers in season because I want to be able to watch Bob's Burgers and no murders in the building. And the thing is like eight months out of the year, that means that there's no four or five months out of the year. There's no reason subscribe to Hulu, which is why again, it's on that list of I will can't, I will, I will subscribe for a couple of months. Like as soon as they offer me that, hey, five bucks a month for three months to come back, I will sign up for those three months. I will get caught up on all the series I want. But then I'll absolutely cancel because compared to YouTube Premium to create for me HBO plus, like this is not a must have. So this is, I'm sure that's part of the decision making inside of Apple thing. If we do this price increase of even a dollar that might provoke people to who are fine with it at 10 bucks, who are okay with it at 11, who are starting to feel the heat at 12. Once we add that $1 more, is that going to make people think it's stupid for us to have YouTube YouTube Premium, which has YouTube Music and this other music app which I don't necessarily love. So I'm sure that was part of the discussion.

[B]

Well, in the end it's math, right? It's how much more revenue do we get by adding a dollar minus how much revenue do we lose by the people we turn off. And if the net is a positive, I guess you do it.

[C]

Yeah, I wish that they were for a lot of these services they did feel a desire to really make a showing of it and really make it best in class. I mean, I love icloud storage because of the way just it's simply part of macOS that my omniautliner documents. They're just simply by virtue of saving it in one place. They're just simply available, available everywhere. I just wish that it were as aggressively good as Google Drive is, for instance, which they keep making this a really valuable piece of real estate to put my files in. Like every three or four or five months there's something new that says, wow, I'm so glad that I'm using this for so many of my projects because it just makes dealing with files on in the real world so much easier. And I'm not getting that from icloud or in a Lot of different Apple services. They're all really, really. Kind of brings us back to that halftime. They're all really good. There's nothing wrong with them, but you kind of wouldn't be. You wouldn't be put out if it didn't exist, almost.

[A]

That's pretty funny. So what is. What is Fitness Plus? Is that Justin Bieber or is that Shakira? What?

[C]

Don't lie, Leo.

[A]

That's true. They don't. Actually, I was really pleased to see Shakira. People are making that decision right now.

[C]

I forgot how good she is.

[A]

She's fantastic and she looks great. I thought she must be older by now, but no, the energy.

[C]

I won't make this into a big distraction. But you have. You have so much appreciation for these performers where you might have forgotten for five, six, seven, eight, nine years. And then you see them on stage, like, 10 years after they were a big hit. Like, my God, they're still bringing it. Like, they're still on a live performance. They're still acting like, I'm 23 years old and my. My whole career, and this is the best time of my life. I'm not going to waste a second of this. Anyway,

[A]

what was I going to say? Oh, yeah, everybody's making these decisions right now with Netflix, with. Everything is. And I imagine all these companies are kind of a little bit on edge saying, well, did I push it too far? And I guess Apple, among all the companies you could think of, is probably the least likely to suffer from this kind of thing. I just feel like, I don't know. We ask a lot of Apple, don't we? Maybe we ask too much.

[B]

Much.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I guess. I guess to some. To sum up more. More coherently, what I was saying earlier, it's kind of like when you go out to dinner with somebody that, you know, cashed out of Google, like, at 45, and they've got $100 million. And it's like, again, it's. It might be unfair that you're thinking, why are you fighting me on the fact that, like, I had a dessert and you didn't? Like, why aren't we not even. Like they should take the checks? Like, why. Why is it that you. You don't want to split this check six ways? It's like. Like, you of all people, even though that's unfair, but it does. Like, it does attract that kind of.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

The pushback.

[A]

Yes. How many. How many trillions of dollars are they worth right now? Their market cap is soaring. Their stock price has gone up a lot.

[C]

Big news on Friday because Nvidia were trading slots for the number one, the most valuable company in the world. And I think they, Nvidia took the crown at the end of the day. But a lot of the financial news was like excited about like maybe are we going to get to $4.9 trillion? This is not a sign of a problem with the economy. This is wonderful.

[A]

Yeah. Market cap, 4.8 trillion freaking dollars. That's, that's, that's almost.

[C]

I think they're going to be fine. That's, I think they will be fine for this chip shortage. I think they'll do okay.

[A]

Yeah. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. All right, let us take a little break and then we're going to talk about some other things or some legal matters pending and some unpending, I guess. Is that what you call it when lawsuits get dismissed? They're now no longer pending. Plus some AI stories. I guess that OpenAI lawsuit's still going on and a whole lot more. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Christina and Jason. Our show today brought to you by Ethos. Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy, 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds. You can apply in minutes and get the same day coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions and you can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies as low as $30 a month. And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers. I know. You know, I'm just thinking back when I, when the kids were born now Almost more than 30 years ago, I didn't have life insurance at the time. I didn't need it. I thought, you know, I'm footloose and fancy free. But then the kids come along and I thought, ah, maybe I have some responsibilities now. I wish Ethos had been around then. This boy, this is the way to do it. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free [e-mail] MacBreak that's E T H O S.com MacBreak Application times may vary, rates may vary. Ethos.com MacBreak thank you so much for supporting MacBreak weekly. I, you know, I'm a big supporter of Section 230 because it protects me, it protects our chat room, it protects our forums, it protects our mastodon instance. But there are a lot of people who say, oh no, 230 protects big tech. And it's, it's, it lets big tech get away with murder. 230 for those who don't know. And the best place to find out about it is just Google. What is section230 for? On the site techdirt.com he has a really excellent. Mike Mazdak has an excellent explanation. But basically it's a section of the, of the CDMA which says Communications act, which says that a information service is not liable for the content posted on that service. It gives us, it's, it's, it's short. It gives us the ability to moderate. We can't be sued for taking down content, which is really important. We can't be sued for leaving content up and we can't be sued if some bad actor comes and posts in our chat room something evil. But it also protects the big companies. And there was a $32.8 billion lawsuit against Apple and iCloud from 2024. It has accused Apple of, quote, privacy, washing and failing to deal with the issue of CSAM child sexual abuse material on iCloud. The judge has now dismissed this as of July 14th. A week ago, District Judge Noel Weiss in San Jose, California agreed with Apple's argument that Section 230 of the Communications Decency act protects it. They're not liable OR CSAM on iCloud. And that was going to be a class action suit, 2,680 people, compensatory damages potentially of $32.8 billion. The judge said there is no federal law that would. This, by the way, I like. There was no federal law that would force Apple to create new tools or deploy existing technology to identify and report csam. Remember, Apple initially proposed some sort of scanning technology, but after all of the backlash backed down. And now under the ruling, they are not liable for that.

[C]

Yeah, the judge was.

[A]

Nobody likes csam.

[C]

Let's be clear.

[A]

Nobody wants CSAM to exist.

[B]

Well, somebody does and they're very bad and they should go to jail.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Yeah, the judge was actually kind of explicit. Like if you read a lot of these rulings, like, it's weird, it's a little bit out of character when you see a judge inject what seems to be a very, very personal sort of part of the narrative. And you mentioned that, hey, there's no federal law that requires Apple to do this, therefore they're absolutely off the hook here. Did say, she did say that within the context of saying that she kind of wishes that Congress would pass some sort of a law because of the, because of the shelter that modern technology gives to people doing one of the most incomprehensible and horrific crimes that are on the books today. And I mean the worry is that this is a valid argument and that the problem is that if, although I kind of support this kind of idea, that we should find a way to basically require companies to do advanced scanning on this. I think that there are a lot of parties that are more interested in weakening section 230 as a whole. That basically saying that we want to remove shield shielding from all these companies. Just as a matter of principle we need to rewrite section 230 or amend it. Not a. Because yes, we will get this law passed to give companies requirements to be more strict against, against CSAM. But also we want the ability to sue YouTube, to sue Google, to sue everybody because they decided to publish a very, very unflattering photo of someone in power who does not want that photo to exist. So that is the, that is the danger. But it's, it's hard to know what side to.

[D]

It's.

[C]

It's as Jason often says there, it's possible to have more than one opinion about something. And this is the most confounding of all because all of our principles are kind of at war with each other.

[A]

Yeah, nobody wants csam. I. This is the post that everybody should look at on Tech dirt. If you're confused about this, particularly if you think section 230 is a bad thing. Hello, you've been referred here because you're wrong about section 230 of the government. Mike Masnik this, he wrote this. It's six years old.

[D]

Still great.

[A]

It's still absolutely germane and we are still hearing now a lot of people saying, oh, it's gotta be modified. It's a massive gift to Big Tech.

[B]

This is the problem. It is. Look, see, Sam is about the worst thing you could imagine.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And that's no accident. They are using the worst thing you can imagine because all sorts of interests want to use this and make them say, this is why I get kind of mad about this whole thing. There are a lot of people out there who don't really care about this. They don't. They just want to find a bad thing that they can use as a battering ram to get what they want. And they want to frame it in a way where if you're against what they want to do, you're for csam, which is not the case. But what they want to. That's the game that they're playing is like you're either with me or against me. And if you're against me, you're with the monsters. And these people want to do stuff like put cracks in section 230 so that they can there is controlling of speech and chilling a speech on the Internet. And let's not forget the other part of this is using it as an excuse to break down end to end encryption because ultimately what they want to do is they want to be able to look at all of your digital information whenever they want. And they are using CSAM as a pretext for it. And that's why all of us who are tech savvy need to stand up and say this is not it. And honestly, I got to be honest, as much as I am sympathetic to the people who stand outside Apple park at WWDC every year with their signs that say Tim Cook fight against Stop supporting csam, Stop support child abusers. And they're out there every year, the fact is those people, I believe, really believe it, but they're being used by people who don't care about their thing because they just want to use it to get our information and control our speech. That's it.

[D]

I could not agree more. I think you're exactly right. The other thing I would say too is that I was very, I was very upset when five years ago Apple introduced plans that they did not implement where they were going to be automatically scanning your iCloud for CSAM. And they got a lot of very valid pushback from people in the privacy community, from parenting groups, from all kinds of folks. Because I maybe the technology eventually gets to a place where you can have a no, you know, like false positive error on that. I don't think so. Right. There are so many questions about that in my mind and I was very, very upset when they did that. But I was very, very heartened when they pulled back from that and said, no, we're not going to do that. And so the fact that this lawsuit has been dismissed, I'm very happy about that. But I hope that this does not in some way try to encourage, whether it's Apple or other companies to say, oh well, yeah, we should take this on again and maybe it won't be required by the government, but we'll go ahead and we'll, we'll put these provisions in place ourselves voluntarily. Because as Jason said, I'm sympathetic to people's position, but I think they're being paused and being used. And this is really just the worst example. Jason said it perfectly. This is the worst example that's being used so that they can take away our privacy, so they can take away end to end encryption so they can control flow of information and come after us. And if we think that that won't happen in the United States of America, like look at people who are being arrested because of things they post on social media that are, you know, that criticize the government. Right. Many of those cases have been thrown out, but this is happening now. If you then allow courts to have access to your cloud contents and get rid of encryption and things like this, it only gets worse. And the people who fundamentally you're usually hurt the most are not the people who are actually committing the crimes because the criminals will be finding other ways to commit the crimes regardless. But regular people and our regular actual rights are the ones that get infringed on.

[C]

Yeah, and it is absolutely true that these are oftentimes, these are just trojan horses for something far more sinister. Just like I think that most people agree that there should be protections for children on social media. And it would seem as though having age identity checks on all new social media accounts is a way to do that. And, but the thing is, that's also a way for large entities to think that we want to make sure that privacy on the Internet does not exist or anonymity on the Internet rather doesn't exist. We want to make sure that everybody who wants to use the Internet in any meaningful way must have at some point submitted their actual provable identity to a force. So that a. If it means that a government can then subpoena that information and unwind the identity of somebody who posted something on Blue sky, that again, a totalitarian regime does not approve of a regime that likes to find people like that and make them disappear. Hey, who cares? So yeah, we need to be completely on watch. I mean section 230 might need some looking at and some maintenance as it is a German court, I think a German court recently for instance, ruled against Google for their AI overviews. Basically. Yeah, yeah, there was a, there was a couple of different publishers were basically maligned by these overviews because when people were asking hey, what's the reputation of this organization? AI Overviews confused them with other organizations that were doing shady subscription practices, all this sort of stuff. And so Google tried to get out of this by basically using their Germans equivalency of Section 230, saying that well look, we're protected as a, just as a, as a, we're not a publisher, we're not an editorial, we're just basically a publisher. And the German court says an AI is not a human being and therefore human Beings do not have access to that protection. Therefore, you are on the hook for all of this. So a lot of conversations need to be had, and we have to make sure that bad things do not get slipped in by trying to basically improve these little weaknesses and these problems, these we want to replace. We want to make sure that these specific actions to fix a specific problem are not used to introduce bigger problems that for the past 10 to 20 years, law enforcement and governments have been trying to get to basically put the Internet under its heel.

[A]

Here's another one. As long as we're in court, let's go back to court.

[C]

We got a suit of gone.

[A]

You may remember, in 2024, the United States Department of Justice went after Apple saying that its monopoly in smartphones violated antitrust laws. Apparently, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, they are in early discussions about settling that lawsuit. German says the two sides have exchanged draft settlement materials, which usually means, you know, well, obviously means they're actively negotiating and maybe even getting close. No trial date has been set. Apple has. Apparently this is not the first time Apple's made offers to the doj, but the activity, according to Gurman, has picked up in recent weeks with two sides exchanging draft settlement materials.

[C]

Yeah, and that's generally how these things end. When the DOJ brings suits, they don't. They can't fight this tutor now. They don't have the resources to fight this tooth or nail.

[A]

This was under Lina Khan at the ftc.

[D]

I was going to say this was a different doj. This was a different ftc, different, different administration. So, yeah, this is not surprising to me at all. And honestly, I always felt like that was. Are there things that you could potentially antitrust actions that you could bring against Apple? Yeah, I think there probably are. Were these that I thought, and I'm not a lawyer or anything, but just as a. As an observer, as a commentator. But like, these were fairly weak things to bring.

[A]

They don't have 100% of the smartphone.

[B]

No, this is like the super apps thing, which they're like, we already did that super app, the mini apps, and they changed some policies a little bit. And like, plus, don't forget, it's the Biden administration.

[D]

Well, exactly.

[B]

Department.

[C]

So very antitrust.

[D]

It was. And they failed. Right. Like, she failed at every single thing that she tried to do. So, you know, congratulations, I guess. But. But yeah, this doesn't surprise me that they're in settlement talks.

[A]

19 other states in the District of Columbia are in the case, and it's not clear whether the State's attorneys general are involved in the discussions, but I think this will be dropped. Look, they dropped Biden's Live Nation lawsuit, which was much more merited if you ask me. I have a feeling the settlement is not far. Just, you know, another gold bar. It's a simple thing. It's not complicated. That ballroom isn't going to build itself, Tim. Oh, God.

[C]

Yeah, let's see this.

[A]

It's not getting much done at all, as a matter of fact, but that's another story entirely.

[C]

That's an interesting argument, though, that going back to Apple now being close to a $5 trillion company, it does mean that they have a lot of legal firepower that sometimes can be wielded in the favor of the public goods, such as, hey, look, if you want to attack Section 230 like we are, if you want, if you want to solve csam, we are happy to solve that together. But if you basically make us compromise the security and the privacy of all of our devices for all of our users, we got $5 trillion to spend to make you basically drop it. What's your budget to make this bill code go through versus we feel as though we don't need. We can run our company however we want that we can basically have a manipulator. We can, we can break antitrust laws, we can do whatever we want. And we have $5 trillion to back up the idea that whatever you try to do, whatever action you try to lodge against us, we can basically keep this tied up so much that we will basically get anything pled down to $500 fine and time served. So come at us if you like. There are two sides to every corn and it's good and bad.

[A]

Two sides to every corn.

[C]

Coin.

[A]

Last time I had a corn on the cob, there was only one side.

[C]

Channeling at Norton on the Honeymooners, like, yeah, we'll flip a Kern Kern. Sorry about that.

[A]

There's two sides every colonel, I will grant you that. So I like the idea of replaceable batteries. I do wish my iPhone had a replaceable battery, although there's a rumor we'll get to that. That it might have some sort of double battery thing. There are devices which is pretty hard to replace the batteries in, like, I don't know, AirPods, Apple watches, the EU, which was going to require that devices have easily removable and replaceable batteries, have now ruled that. Yeah, no, if it's a wearable, you don't. You don't have to replace it. Apple glasses, if they ever do one meta Glasses no longer need to have replaceable batteries. I guess it's just a technical thing, right? You just. Yeah, it's just can't do it.

[C]

This is why, like, I admit this as a prejudice, but I'm prejudiced. When the EU takes those kind of legislative regulative actions, I don't think that everything they do is great, but I do think they have a good track record of proposing something and then modifying it as they go when they see when problems seem to occur. And to me, this seems like one of those problems. I would like to. I would like to see companies like Apple encouraged to figure out a way to make batteries replaceable. Inside of AirPods, there are third parties that can do that for you, although they're kind of hit and miss. I mean, we did discuss like a few weeks ago. We're talking about the idea of an Apple ring that. I just hate the idea that this is a $400 device that will last for two and a half or three years and then become e waste. But how? I mean, with a ring. Yeah, that is how. There's absolutely no way to do it.

[A]

Yeah. But I have an aura ring and yeah, I have mis. I have mixed feelings about it. Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I've had an OURA ring die because I couldn't charge it anymore and I replaced it with another OURA ring.

[B]

But yeah, I feel like, you know, a lot of these cutting edge things, they're just. The cutting edge things are not as replaceable and then over time they get more space and they have more ability and all of that. So with some of the newer, Even something like AirPods, I'm okay with the idea that I can't pop the battery out. But what I would like is a story about how if I take it back, Apple, they will disassemble because remember, a lot of that stuff has valuable components in it. Apple has made a great success of using recycled components in part because they take them back and then they, and then they break them apart and then they take all the components out of them and they use them. I just want to hear that story, right? If it's not repairable, recyclable, renewable in ways that make sense and I can, like, I can give them a flyer because this is so miniaturized, it's less likely that that's going to be possible. That's a. I mean, I can accept that, but I would like to hear what your story is. If I bring these back in three years, are you going to be able to take them apart and Reuse the components or the, or the elements inside or whatever for future use or are they just going in a landfill? Because that's, that's what I don't want to hear here.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And this and the, and to be. And also it should be pointed out that this law also is the reason why to replace a battery on an iPhone, you no longer have to disassemble the entire thing from the top down to get the battery.

[B]

It's not glued in anymore. And like. Great, Exactly. That's, that's what people misunderstand is like it's not cartridge a battery door and slide it out, but it is within reason. You could unscrew things and pop the battery off and do a self repair.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. And there were reasons, you know, why Apple had moved into the direction that they moved into, you know, away from replaceable batteries and laptops and in phones. I mean, I think especially now that we see that they can actually do it without glue and without the tabs, that that shows that that was always possible. It just wasn't maybe the easiest thing to do. But like there are valid reasons to do that in so far as like just economy of space and how you can use the space most effectively so that you can actually have your battery as much capacity as possible in the size of the chassis that you have. And so in a laptop that means that you have multiple cells. In a phone it means that it's not going to be like the normal type of shape. And I think that those are all trade offs that a lot of us would probably take. But yeah, I mean one of the nice side effects of this is that yeah, it is now easier to repair your battery, replace it with, you know, a part that now Apple does provide. Granted, you know, they don't make it super easy to get, but you can in fact order you know, a part from them and, and they even, you know, provide the tools to you if that's what you need. And so I think that's all positive. I think things like AirPods. Would it be great if they could get to that point someday? Yes, I think especially when you look at the over the counter like hearing aid market, you know, with standard hearing aids that you, you buy usually do have replaceable batteries.

[A]

That's a good point.

[D]

And so, you know, they usually do. Now granted they don't have as much of the same tech and everything else that like the Apple stuff does, but it is a possibility now you might have to charge more. That's the only thing. And so I Think that that's, that

[A]

becomes smaller batteries so that you.

[D]

Smaller batteries. Right. And it's also, you know, part of the reason why the AirPods are so cool as over the counter, you know, hearing aids is that it's $250 versus $1,200. Right. So that, I'm sure that part of that is miniaturization.

[A]

$7,000.

[D]

Oh, yes. I, I, I was, I was using Costco pricing, so I was already, I was already using.

[A]

You should have gone to Costco.

[D]

I mean, that's, everybody should go to Costco for, for hearing aids. But you, especially if you already have like a good hearing exam done. Because usually you can get the same hearing aids, but for a fraction of the price. Yeah. You can save thousands like I think they have.

[A]

Yeah, they're really expensive if you go to an audiologist.

[D]

They really are. And, and so I'm sure that's part of why, you know, like, you've made a consumer product you're not necessarily thinking about.

[A]

My first set of hearing aids actually had batteries that you took out and put in new ones. Yeah, they wore out. Now they're rechargeable, but, yeah, So, I mean, and they're not much bigger. The rechargeable ones, in fact, are the same. Not much smaller, I should say. Then it's about the same size. So, yeah, it's, you can do it. One of the things EU said as well, especially because they have to be waterproof and dustproof and, you know, you don't want to have a case that's open. I don't know.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not saying that it's even like a pressing thing. I'm glad that they made an exception in that case, but it is something they needed to. But I'm just saying, like, this is an area where, as we've seen with phones and laptops and other components, that maybe eventually we will get to economy of scale as such, where technology will improve enough that you can make them, if not easily user replaceable, then at least serviceable to Jason's point. So that at the end of this, you're not just e wasting the AirPods, which is, I think, what they do now. Right. Like, I'm pretty sure they just chuck them. I don't think that they take anything, any part of the components from them at all. And that would be nice if they had a mechanism to not do that. Like, I think Apple watches, I think they can probably save, you know, the main board and other components from that. But, you know, I think, I think AirPods are probably one of those things

[A]

that you toss when I buy a new device. Well, not the AirPods but the Apple Watch. I sent it in.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Do they recycle AirPods? Do we know? I don't think they do actually.

[D]

I think that, I think that they. I think they responsibly get rid of them is I think what the term is. I'm not exactly sure because it's one

[A]

of those things like certainly tended by remove.

[B]

I think they do remove the batteries. I think they've got a lithium ion. Lithium ion, yeah.

[C]

You could pry part. Yeah.

[D]

You probably pry it apart. Sure. Yeah. I mean, and that's possible. Right. I just more mean like it's not like they're going to be reusing those kind of components. I don't know. Right. Whereas like an Apple watch. Because they do sell refurbished Apple watches. You could. And they do sell, you know, like refurbished Apple watches. That could be one that I could see being resold. There's AirPods. Yeah. Maybe take the batteries out to responsibly recycle them. But it's not like they're going to be, you know, reusing that, you know, transistor or whatever.

[A]

You guys use Hide my. The hide my email feature. Anybody use that I've used? I have when I buy stuff through Apple Pay. You have the choice of having your Mac email or you could say, no, hide my email. Don't use my real email. Which gives you some sense of privacy. Mail to that address that they provide you does end up getting forwarded by Apple to your iCloud account. But apparently 401 media and a security researcher reported this earlier this month. It don't always work. Privacy isn't perfect and apparently it can leak your email. I'm not sure how, but Apple is now being sued because these randomly generated email addresses apparently aren't as private as we thought.

[D]

I mean look, you can sue anybody for anything, but this seems pretty silly.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't. Yeah. It's a class action.

[D]

It's a class action thing and I get that.

[A]

Here's the reason. There's maybe some merit to this. Apple knew about this for more than a year here.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And did nothing.

[C]

444 media is reporting this morning that they finally closed the. The thing.

[A]

Oh good.

[C]

That's. That's what annoyed the hell out of me that this was around for like a long time and that it wasn't a. Oops, we better fix this right away. I mean a class action suit is kind of okay. It's the same reason why there's a class action suit regarding Apple's promises on Apple intelligence that based on wow, I better I'm gonna buy a brand new iPhone because in just two or three, four months time is going to be able to do all this magical stuff. I don't think that the Apple has sinned that they need to repent and they do. But it's. This is why class action suits exist. If all that happens is that all the people who respond to this get $4.80 and in iTunes store credit, at least Apple has to say, yeah, you know what, maybe we should have fixed that before a year had passed by.

[A]

If people were, I mean they were selling it, but they was as privacy. I mean, you know, it was people paid for iCloud plus partly perhaps because of the hide my email feature.

[D]

Maybe, maybe. I mean, I don't know. I guess the way I look at it is I think it's slightly different than the Apple Intelligence thing because in that case you literally had like, as we now know, like created out of thin air vaporware demos that showed a product that did not exist.

[A]

That's pretty good.

[D]

And you sold that as a thing that was going to happen. Right. And do I feel like they should be raked over the coals for that forever? No, companies do that all the time. But, but Apple typically is not. Whereas in this case, I don't know, even when I sign up for a service and I've, maybe I'm, I'm alone in this, but even when I've used that feature before, I've never actually believed like deep in my heart of hearts that my information was completely private from the company that I signed up with. Right. Like I'm still choosing to give an email address to this company. Right. And so there's still a database table somewhere that has whatever this Apple ID is and it is connected to my name. Right. So I do understand the argument, like, oh well, I paid for this and then I was told it was one thing it wasn't. And it's certainly not good that they let something go for a year without fixing the hold. But I also feel like, come on, this is a little bit of a. You're still knowingly giving out your email address to a company and ultimately how that's going to be used is up to that company. It's not up to your email provider.

[B]

It's not quite a secure. I mean it is a security feature. But I always felt like the real killer feature of this was you could turn the alias off.

[D]

Exactly right.

[B]

Not that, not that no one will be able to guess who I am because if you do anything to interact with them, you're going to tell them who you are, even if you don't give them your email address. But more that they're going to take that email address and who knows who they're going to sell it to or they're not going to honor your unsubscribe and then you have the ability to just to mark it off. But even so, if they can look up your actual Apple ID then they've got another email address to harvest. But it just, it's annoying and it's annoying that it hung out there for a year and that as soon as it got pressed they fixed it. That's like the worst. But in the grand scheme of things it's not the worst security breach you could have. It's like a low key security issue.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I think many email providers, certainly my email provider Fast Mail lets me. Well, it's because I own the domain. So I have a domain and I can have an infinite number of names before the AT sign. So what I mean when I sign up for something, you know, I signed up for 404 Media, it's 404 Media at that email address. So I have an infinite number of those. It's not private in that sense, but I can certainly filter it out. And I know if they sell my address, I know who sold it, which is.

[B]

Oh man.

[A]

Surprisingly that doesn't happen as often as I thought it might.

[B]

You know who does it is Bloomberg. You pay like $80 a year or whatever for Bloomberg and they sell your email address everywhere. It's so annoying.

[D]

They do. And political campaigns, if you ever donate to any political campaign, they will sell you down the river like your phone number, your email, everything. To the point that like I actually won't donate to campaigns anymore and it's it and I, I'm a civically minded person. I would like to give to them, but I do not want their, their emails, I do not want their texts, you know.

[A]

Right, yeah. So just use a junk mail address. Right. Isn't that what people did for years? They had a Yahoo mail address?

[D]

Yes, true. I mean, and I think a lot of us have that sometimes. Like when they want your phone number too. That's the one that bothers me because that's a lot harder that, that, that's a lot harder to, to get around. Unless you have multiple phone numbers, in which case then you have to deal with. With multiple things of spam and whatnot. So it's. Yeah.

[A]

Yep. All right, let's take a little break. More to come. We haven't mentioned OpenAI this whole show. It's an amazing thing. Here we are almost an hour in. We will. Don't worry. Christina Warren is here. Film Girl. Always nice to see Film Girl. I see we've taken the underscore out in Film Girl. Are you using the underscore less version now?

[D]

What? Well, okay, no, the problem is it's two problems. It depends on the service. The problem is that I did not realize when I took that on as my username that that would be my username Everywhere and GitHub Forever for the

[A]

rest of your life, basically.

[D]

Right. And so GitHub does not have an underscore because they don't support it. Right. And so same thing with Blue Sky. But Mastodon does. Twitter does. So it varies. Instagram does. So it varies service by service. So I'm either FilmGirl or Film Girl, depending on where I am. But if you. If you search Film Girl, you'll usually find me, is what I. Is what I try to say.

[A]

There you are. Film Girl without the underscore on GitHub. You know, my son, when he started his business, called himself Salthank. And I said, dude, what are you doing? What are you doing? Underscore.

[B]

Really?

[A]

He didn't put any thought into it at all.

[D]

I mean, he was like me, and now he's Salt Hank.

[A]

You didn't know what would happen.

[D]

And he's much more successful than I am. But, like, it becomes your branding thing, right? Like, that's just it. It is what it is. Like, things you do when you're in college, you do not think are going to become like you.

[A]

You know, that is such a profound things you do in college. You don't think what might happen when you get out of college?

[C]

I just like that sign that I am so old school. I predate being able to have put spaces and file names.

[B]

Dude.

[C]

And you count names. That's how old school I am.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

I. I still don't trust up lowercase and uppercase, man.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

Well, I'm surprised that bluesky doesn't allow the underscore. That is weird.

[D]

GitHub doesn't either. A lot of places don't. And I guess it's about sanitation.

[A]

I understand. But bluesky, look, if you're gonna be a social network, I don't know, I

[D]

think it comes down to sanitization practices. Probably it probably messes up their regex stuff. We have. One of my good friends at GitHub is Matt R. Dash and that is literally his username. He's been at GitHub for a really, really long time and his username is used as a sanity testing thing in a number of different services to make sure that it won't catch somebody's username because it's not common that people will have. You can have a Dash in a username but not an underscore and it's not common that you'll have that. But especially since it's at the end of his name, there are a number of services where they use him as part of the testing suite to make sure that nothing will break.

[A]

I do know that people still use their college or even high school or even grade school handles because in our, you know, Club Twit Discord, there are a lot of weird handles. Mashed potato, chocolate milk, mini sip. Actually it looks like he's changed that so he doesn't use that anymore. And there's Film girl with an unders. We allow an underscore Film girl.

[D]

Yeah. Which I appreciate. Thank you very much.

[A]

Andy Inaco is here. He has a name you can't even spell, but that's how I remember it. I have no idea how to spell it. I have no ATKO I H, N, A T, K O. You told me that years ago. A friend of yours uses that and

[C]

I know that was there somewhere. There's a, there's a middle aged woman who used to run, used to work the counter at a video rental store like near my neighborhood who has given me this legacy because on her last day I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, you're the only person. Because of course my name on the card was like what you like what? Your account name at this independent thing. Oh, I, I remember because I just say I have no idea how to spell his name. So she has no. She's living her life, having a great time, but she does not know what a positive impact she has had on a stranger's life.

[A]

Let's hope she's not still working at the video film store.

[C]

Oh no, that went out of business a long time ago. Yeah, matter of fact, I bought their shelving when they went out of business.

[A]

Wow, okay. You have hundreds of feet of shelving now. Aren't you a lucky guy?

[C]

Shelving like 5 inches high and like 8 inches deep. It's not the most, just the right

[A]

size for all those VHS cassettes and of Jason Snell. Is here. 6colors.com. See, he didn't put an underscore. It could have been 6/colors.com.

[D]

but no, he was smart.

[B]

No, you gotta. You can't do that. You gotta have English words. I learned my lesson with. With domains that weren't dot coms and that you had to spell out loud letter by letter. And I'm not doing that again. Also, yes, and I'm J. Snell everywhere. Mostly because that was the format that was assigned to me my sophomore year in college when I got my first email address that was personalized, and it's been that way ever since.

[A]

So. Yeah. Yeah, you can tell when people have UNIX handles like that they have from college. There's a certain. I don't know what it is.

[B]

Yeah, literally, I went into the. You know, the math department. Yeah. We were where it was physics and math building, I think, at UC San Diego in September of what, 1989. And they said, okay, you are jsnellucsd eduardo. And it's like, that's it. That's it forever.

[C]

The first name, last initial generation of Internet usage.

[A]

Yeah, I think I'm Leo L. Yeah. Leo L. Well, the year.

[B]

My freshman year, they just assigned me a random number. There was. They're like, we're not personalizing undergraduate computer accounts. You're PA151.

[A]

I am not a number. I'm a man.

[B]

But the next year, they were like, all right, maybe it was like, you're a sophomore now. You can have your name now.

[A]

Speaking of. I am not a number. The Prisoner is on the Criterion Collection now, on the Criterion Channel. I've been watching the old Prisoner shows.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

Wow. They. They are a trip. Literally.

[C]

Oh, there's. It's still. You know, I was watching. I was watching. To mention another. Another awesome show. I was watching one of the episodes of columbo where Patrick McGoohan was the killer. He did. He was the killer three times. And it. The. There are so many freaking Prisoner references. It's delightful even.

[A]

Really?

[C]

Even.

[A]

Well, a.

[C]

Hey, he plays. Plays a spy to begin with, but also he says, be seeing you to her secretaries, like, for a couple of times. And also he's wearing. In his. In his big, like, walk and talk with Leslie Nielsen, who plays, like, his murder victim. He's got, like, not a. He doesn't have the same jacket as he has with the Prisoner. Like, the black jacket with the white piping.

[A]

Piping.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

But he's got, like, a dark, dark. Dark blue windbreaker and the zipper Lining is white, so it has the exact same effect. I'm like, oh, you knew what you were doing. You knew exactly what you were doing there, man.

[A]

Anyways, he was Secret Agent Man. The Johnny Rivers song, He Was a Secret Agent was a great show, which I used to watch. And then the Prisoner was kind of his rebuttal to all of that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The good old days.

[C]

Anyway, such a great series.

[A]

Yeah. Let's take a little break. When we come back. Yes, OpenAI. But first, I want to tell you about Sarasync, our sponsor for this segment of Mac Break Weekly. And this is for all the businesses out there who, you know, you're an Apple shop, but the back office, you know what, almost always it still runs. Microsoft 365. So that means your company directory lives somewhere that your iPhone goes.

[C]

Huh?

[A]

It can't naturally see, which means everyone's contact app on their phone is full of personal numbers and none of the work numbers. And that's no good. A coworker calls. It's just a number on the screen. You know, the new guy and your boss all somehow wind up with different numbers for the same department head in your sale. She ends up declining your calls because the boss doesn't have the right numbers either. And the whole thing is just a mess. Cira Sync C I R A S Y N C fixes that this is, you know, it's. I'm so glad this exists. It pushes your whole company directory context and calendars right directly into the Contacts app on every iPhone on every Mac automatically. It just shows up. It stays current. It synchronizes on its own. You need this in your business. Go to sarasync.com macbreak and book your free demo. The Cira Sync team will walk you through how convenient and hassle free it is and can even help you get set up on the call so you can roll it out across your whole organization. That's sirasync.com macbreak to get your whole company's contact on every iPhone in the office automatically. I love this kind of sponsor because it solves a very specific pain point. But if you're living in that world, you know exactly, you know that pain. Sarasync.com MacBreak welcome brand new sponsor to MacBreak weekly. Is the OpenAI lawsuit still on? Are we still still suing them?

[D]

They're still suing.

[A]

Yeah, still suing. Have we learned any more?

[D]

Well, they have now sent discovery letters or I guess don't delete letters to 40 employees, which, okay, so Financial Times

[A]

says Apple has sent letters to former. It's the other side of the corn. Former 40, former employee. It's not easy. Apple, let me start over. The Financial Times is saying Apple sent letters to approximately 40 former employees saying, do not delete. Boy, wow. Can you enjoin former employees not to delete documents?

[D]

I don't know. This is what was unclear. And I looked at the Financial Times direct source, not just the 9 to 5 Mac.

[A]

Yeah, let me go back.

[D]

And I still am. It's still not clear to me if this was like official legal communications or if this was just a lawyer sends you an email that said, don't do this. Right.

[A]

It's a demand letter.

[D]

Letter.

[A]

In fact, they demand meetings with Apple lawyers.

[D]

Right. But I don't know if that is legally binding or if it's just like a scare.

[A]

Anything.

[D]

I was going to say, like, like, all I know is, and I'm obviously not giving advice to anyone, but if I were to receive a letter like this, I would immediately get my own counsel. It is not that. If it is not Open AIs, that is not anybody else. I would immediately get my own counsel and I would, like, abide by whatever they say. But I certainly would not be like, oh, yes, Apple, I will absolutely give you everything and I will show you up for this meeting. Right. Like, no. But does this.

[A]

If you're One of those 40, the presumption is you went to open AI, right? These are probably all Open AI employees.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So, hell, it's a hell of a distraction technique. Like now, so much of your company is now going to be devoted to addressing all these concerns of employees who are getting these layers saying, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And that's a really. Whether it's necessary or not. What a nice intimidation tactic.

[A]

Yeah, those are.

[C]

Those are, those are wartime lawyers.

[B]

Yeah. This is one of those things where, you know, if what is alleged is even, like, remotely true. I think there's some people who work at Open AI who are in trouble regardless of what it means for OpenAI. But, but as I said last week, make no mistake, part of this is also about intimidation. It's about intimidation at OpenAI to, to, you know, shake some things loose there and maybe get them to change their behavior or to get people to admit to what they're doing there. And it's also to create a chilling effect around people who might be thinking of going to OpenAI from Apple and that, you know, again, I'm a real advocate for people who want to get A better job and get paid better. That. And obviously Apple would like those people not to have left, but they don't get to decide that. But, you know, a side benefit of this is it makes everybody a little on edge about Apple and OpenAI and about leaving Apple. And that is. It's probably not the prime motivator here, but it is totally a motivator. Yeah.

[D]

I also wonder too, if, in addition to. Because, like, look, if employees want to leave, like, there are a lot of places that they can go. But I do wonder if this means that. And this would also probably be. Probably not the intended effect, but a nice side effect would be okay if OpenAI looks at this and goes, all right, we're not going to recruit as heavily from Apple as we were. Right. Like, we have other, you know, companies we can, we can approach if we're wanting to do recruitment efforts, or we can, you know, approach employees in different ways. Like that. That could be a side effect too, is that OpenAI is just like, okay, we also don't want to deal with this. But, yeah, I mean, I think that this definitely will make people much more circumspect before leaving. And I hope that the only impact if somebody wants to leave is that they know, okay, under no circumstances do you take anything with you. Be very above board. Like, don't even, you know, I would go as far as to probably not even download any of my personal documents before, Before I left, Just. Just to be clear, you know, and clean. But who knows?

[A]

Yeah, I would assume it's just intimidation. I think it's also discovery. Right. Apple's really trying to figure out what people brought with them, what they know.

[D]

Well, yeah.

[A]

And then that's what you do in the case like this.

[D]

Well, and I think that's why, like, I would be more curious about what the nature of the demand letter is. Is the this literally just from a lawyer that says, keep this in mind, might be calling you, is part of this lawsuit, or is there some sort of legal teeth behind it? And that's what I don't know. Because if there's not any legal teeth behind it, then they can advise you all you want. But if I decided to wipe all my devices, you know, what are you going to do? My lawyer might not tell me to do that. I don't know. My lawyer might say, don't touch anything. But at the same time, if I've already wiped my devices before either got that demand letter or anything else, I don't. I don't know what they can do here, because it does seem to be at least somewhat saying, okay, we're reaching out to these 40 employees. We think that they might have information that might come out in discovery. But the fact that this came out before it's, you know, even a judge has even weighed in on anything. I don't know the legal validity of any of these demand letters.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of times I know this happens, that lawyers sent out letters that are intended to scare. They may not. You could just ignore them, but they. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, you know, this is a soap opera that will continue for many, many years to come. The gift that keeps on giving. And we will. You'll keep on hearing about it, I'm sorry to say, for as long as it remains of interest. Apple Intelligence is in China. They've made a deal with Alibaba, and that means they'll be using Quinn Alibaba's models, which are quite good on as Apple AI instead of. Instead of Gemini. Although this raises the question of what exactly is running in the US On Apple Intelligence.

[B]

And I think. I think this is specifically not Siri AI. Right. This is like 2024 old school.

[A]

This is what happens when you go to ChatGPT instead of ChatGPT, you go to Quinn.

[B]

Well, no, I think. I think they. No, this is instead of Apple's foundation models, I think is the.

[A]

Oh, entirely. So this, though, according to Reuters, China's cyberspace regulator, I'm sure they don't call themselves that. Has allowed Apple's intelligence to be registered for use on iPhones in China. Okay. Obviously, I mean, it makes sense that you would have to use a sovereign company in China.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You wants to do the same thing, I'm sure, is why it's not in the EU with Siri.

[C]

Of course, there's this added dimensions to this. Like every company, every country, I think correctly says that, look, you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to store all the personal information of our citizens on servers that are inside our country so that they are subject to our privacy laws and of course, to our surveillance. But mostly it's, we need to keep the stuff within our territory. But of course, it also means that. But whenever you ask Siri a question regarding June 4, 1989 in China, China wants to make sure that you get to. Hey, well, here's the baseball scores for that day. Here's the weather of that day. Absolutely nothing happened with protesters. No protesters. People don't protest in our country. So there is that.

[A]

Here's what Reuters says. This is a Reuters story. Alibaba said in a statement to Reuters its Quinn model will be integrated into Alphabet Apple Intelligence across Apple's iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro operating systems in China. Reuters also says Apple's working with Baidu, a competing company, to develop Apple Intelligence features for Chinese iPhone users. What is Apple Intelligence? That's not Siri AI. That's something different.

[B]

That's like on. That's like. I mean, what is that?

[D]

Yeah, I think that's the question.

[B]

All that stuff. It's all that stuff from two years ago and is it going to be all the stuff from now on? Device models, some cloud models.

[D]

Will.

[A]

Will China get Siri AI in the fall? And, and if they do, it's obviously not going to be Google's Gemini.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Trained. That's an interesting question anyway.

[B]

Yeah. And is it, is it. Apple's models are approved, but then when they go off the device, they're going to the, the Baidu models, right? I don't know. I mean, we don't know. This doesn't. I like one of the news stories basically says Apple didn't say anything and the partners didn't say anything that we didn't already know. Okay. So we don't know much about that.

[A]

I have to say Alibaba has released a new Quinn 3.8. The Quinn models are quite good. I use Quen Vision. They are for my cameras. It does a great job describing me as an older gentleman. I use Quinn locally. I use a Quinn 27B model. It's quite a good model. There's a coder model and then I use the new 3.8 preview in my agentic AI and it's very good. I mean I'm, I think it's close to the frontier models from the US GPT5.6 and at least opus 4.8, if

[D]

not fable, they, they do great work. I mean, they, they are. I mean the, the Chinese models, especially the open weight ones are, are a lot of people are very concerned, I think probably overly concerned, but are. You know, that's been a lot of conversation around that. What does occur to me and again, we don't have enough information about this, but this is sort of an interesting question to think about is because presumably this could happen in Europe too, if the EU passes, you know, sovereign laws about what types of AI things can be implemented there. Right now they're just not shipping stuff. But if things were to happen. This I think raises an interesting question for a developer where, okay, if I'm building an app and I'm taking advantage of a Apple Intelligence features. If there are underlying different models happening in different countries, can I test for that? How can I account for that? Do I just not implement those features? What's the kind of scenario there? And that's interesting because we've had a few cases over the years where there have been certain SDK features that have only been available in certain regions and China has certainly been excluded from some of those things. But not where something could I think be as. Because these are not deterministic systems where you could have a different result or a different feel based on what the underlying model is, whether it's the local model running on device or the cloud model that it's talking to. And so I think that just becomes interesting if you're say an app developer and you're looking at, okay, well am I building multiple apps for multiple different regions or am I only going to focus on specific regions or what the scenario will be.

[A]

Yeah, if in fact, and I apologize because I know you used to work for Google, but if in fact they do get Quinn instead of Gemini, I might be jealous.

[D]

Well, I mean, honest. Well, I think it would depend on what model they would be using. Right. Because certainly I think the Quinn models are very good and certainly better in some regards than some of the others out there. So I think it would totally depend on what they're doing. But I mean look like, and maybe this, maybe I'm over conflating how important this is and this is just kind of like how. Well in the EU you can have multiple app stores and here you can't and this will be kind of an edge case. I don't know. But it is interesting that they are going to be bringing some variant of Apple intelligence, however that's defined, you know, to China, albeit following China's rules. And maybe it's just as simple as, and I don't actually know this definitively, I assume that iCloud works slightly differently in China than it does in the US I know that if you have a US based account, obviously you're going through US servers, but if you have a Chinese based account, it's, it's different. So maybe it's just a, yet another kind of fragmentation line based on, you know, where you bought your phone and where your Apple account is, is was created.

[A]

Yeah, you're, I mean it makes sense you're going to get, not, not purely because of Tiananmen Square, but you're going to get a sovereign model. And I'm sure the EU wants to do the same thing. I don't know what you will get. If it's Mistral, I'd rather have.

[D]

I was good. Well, I was going to say, I think it would have to be Mistral. I think that they're the only, they're the only ones who are of any size. Yeah, they're the only ones who've, you know, kind of raised at, you know, who maybe have the size of that. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure that that's something. I was in Germany the other week and that was certainly a conversation that came up a lot from, from various

[A]

people, was, okay, they want Siri AI. They probably do, right?

[D]

Well, I don't even know so much about Siri AI. It's just more about like there was a sense that I got from talking to European users, AI users that they don't feel like they can trust that the US Will allow them to still have access to things. And so I think that there are, I'm sure that they would like those features on their phone, but I don't know if that's as much of a pressing concern as it would be. We want to make sure that a model that we are getting access to doesn't get taken away from us at the whim of a government that is not our own.

[A]

As in the Fable Rug Pull.

[D]

Exactly.

[A]

Earlier this month, actually, this is, we won't talk about it here, but if you tune in twit from last Sunday and, and the upcoming Intelligent machines on Wednesday, we will be talking about this. This is a hot topic right now. President Xi at the AI Summit said, ah, we support open models, open weight models. We think it's good for the world and we are going to export, export our open weight models. But there's also noise that the Chinese Communist Party is thinking about blocking access to its internal to its open models to the rest of the world. The Trump government also saying we might want to block Chinese models from use in the United States. Everybody, this is a mess because right now the cheapest, most powerful models are not coming from American companies. Chinese are catching up really rapidly and doing some really interesting things. And I think a lot of people who believe that open weight models are the future, we don't want any one company to dominate, are very excited about what China's doing. We don't really, you know, they, no, there's very few American companies putting out open weight models. Facebook did, but it wasn't very, that was a long time ago.

[C]

What about these accusations that Alibaba is Basically distilling Western models.

[A]

I think that's bs, but that's a very technical and difficult question. The idea being that Alibaba and Zai and all these other companies, Moonshot with their Kimi, make these models and then make, as anthropic has asserted, 24,000 accounts logging into their AI and training post, it's in the post training, doing the reinforcement, learning, using those models, basically sucking the intelligence out of the American models. And I think that's a very American centric and a BS point of view. And I think what Moonshot has done with very limited resources really comes down to great engineering, not distillation. And I also think there's a lot of evidence. Well, first of all, it's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black, for example, to say, well, you stole everything that we stole. Stole from those guys.

[D]

Exactly.

[A]

Part one, part two. I don't grant that anthropics engineering is that much better. You were inside DeepMind. I know you can't probably talk about that, Christina, but. And DeepMind, everybody knows, has the, you know, among the best AI engineers, some of which, some of who actually created this whole. Yes, you know, Tensor and you know, modeling stuff that we use these days, how LLMs are work. I don't think there's a monopoly on this kind of engineering talent in the

[D]

U.S. no, I don't think so. I think the reason people had those allegations first was probably because there is truth to it that you probably did have 24,000 or more accounts being created. And I'm sure that things. Right. And that there might have even been a certain amount of. Okay, we're going to try to validate some of our own refinements and whatnot, maybe using these other models to go back and forth with and try to get some improvements that way. Maybe. Right. But I don't know if that still remains true now. Right. Because this is what's hard about this space is that an assumption that you could have made six months ago might not be accurate six months later. And so I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it too is that, yeah, I don't think that there's a monopoly on where this engineering takes place. And in fact, a lot of the best researchers at any of the American based Frontier Labs, whether that, that's Google, whether that's.

[A]

Many of them are Chinese.

[D]

That's what I was going to say. Many of them are from China. Right. Many of the PhDs and many of

[A]

them are probably going back to China, because that's probably the place to be right now.

[D]

I mean, I think it kind of depends. Right. But I just, I don't think there's a monopoly to your point on that. And I think some of it is a little bit of a cope. That said, I also would not be surprised if some of these companies have done everything they can to try to access as much information as they can and make things as good as possible. Even if that means creating tens of thousands of accounts on a competing platform to do things. So be it. So I mean, I will say that some of the labs, without kind of going any further than that, some of the labs are much more sensitive about that than others. Right. Like some of the labs have a much more, I think, kind of laissez faire attitude and some of the labs are much more sensitive to it. So who knows?

[A]

I think it's completely reasonable. If you look at the guy behind Moonshot, it's completely reasonable to think that these guys have. Interestingly, faced with these hardware constraints, they couldn't get Nvidia chips really done. Some amazing stuff, very good stuff that I don't think just, I don't think it's fair to blame.

[D]

I don't either.

[A]

I think that's a very, we're, you know, we're number one usa. USA kind of attitude toward the whole thing.

[D]

I think the chip question is more interesting to think about. Okay, did they really do this without any Nvidia chips? Right. That, that is to me a much more interesting question. Just because we know that plenty of people have access to the chips that aren't supposed to. And, and, and how you prove that I think is difficult. Right.

[A]

But the Huawei chips are getting better. And in fact, Zai is spinning up an entire Huawei based data center.

[D]

Well, yes, but that's all takes time. But that's not here yet. Right. Like, and these will take years to build up and they're getting better, but they're not equivalent.

[A]

So I think it's good. By the way, I don't think Nvidia should have a monopoly.

[D]

I agree. I fully agree. Granted, we will never in this country be able to have any Huawei equipment ever again, ever, ever.

[A]

They're on the, they're on the banned list.

[D]

And it's now been three administrations, Right. Like the first Trump administration, Biden administration, second Trump administration, that's never coming back. And we're not the only ones, by the way. Like Huawei and ZTE are banned by a lot of governments. So for the networking and other things. So I doubt we'll ever see that. But, but that I would have more question about, I think about like, okay, how did, how did you do this from a hardware standpoint more than you know, whether you were doing post training on other closed models or not.

[A]

Yeah, well, it would be, I would say it would be foolish for the US Frontier companies to assume that that's why they're so good.

[C]

That's a good point.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's not that, oh gosh, they don't have the resources, they don't have the firepower, they don't have the government support. They've got this. They got the work.

[A]

Stealing it.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. They have the machinery to build. They don't just, they don't just have the thing that's. Yeah. To be confronted.

[A]

Now there is an interesting new model that Apple is actually talking to right now. Prism ML. It's an AI startup. They've released something they call Banzai. It's a, it's a, it's a model small enough to run on your iPhone.

[C]

Woo.

[A]

And in fact, Apple has been very interested. Apparently Prism ML is now meeting with Apple about, quote, ways it could use its technology. This comes from the information. Now, I haven't played with the model, have you, Christina? It just came out.

[D]

I have not. It just came out. I have not. And I'm always hesitant anytime anybody's like openly been like, oh yeah, we're in talks with Apple. I'm like, are you, Are you, Are you still? Are you still?

[A]

Yeah. It's also highly quantized.

[D]

I think, I think I was going to say that that's the biggest thing is that to be able to get it to fit on an iPhone, you have to highly quantize it, which is what Google does with Gemma. And that's what like Unsoth does with various versions of various open weight models. And, and you can get a lot of power out of that.

[A]

But there are imperfections for our audience what that, what quantizing is.

[D]

So basically you're compressing how much information density there would be. And so you feel like a four bit quantized model is going to take up much more space and be much more information dense.

[A]

How many bits are the, is a normal model? Is it 32 bits? Is it 8 bits? Is it 16? I think I have an S8 model which is 8 bit.

[D]

Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to say, I was going to say. I think it varies from model to model. I think this point. Right.

[A]

So actually one way to describe it that might be familiar to you is music. When you sample music.

[D]

That's exactly it. It's like an MP3, right. It's like compressing the file in an AAC container or an MP3 container. And so it might be lossy, but it might not be noticeable to your ears. That said, there are going to be specific scenarios where you're not going to be able to get the same kind of impact. Right. So from a speed perspective, that's one of the reasons why you do it for size and speed and it might be good in certain scenarios. Right. So like that's why you can have these super, you know, quantized models that will fit on a device and will be very good for asking, you know, basic kind of facts and information and maybe somewhat do tool calling so you could get to a web search or get more up to date information.

[A]

That's an important point. I think people assume, especially if you've used ChatGPT or a Claude or, or you know, one of the other models, they assume that, that what you want is the smartest thing that knows as much as possible. But in fact a lot of what, especially in agentic AI, what your phone will do isn't really thinking it's calling tools.

[D]

Exactly. And that's this switch. Right. Because if we looked back 18 months ago, that was not really the case. That's when it was. We were very much obsessed with when was the training date on this data. Like how up to date is it, how fresh is it, how much are these things that we need to pull. Whereas now many of the things will just be a tool call to go to, you know, a service provider of your choice. And almost anything that way can do that.

[A]

I mean you don't have to be super smart.

[D]

No, no, no. I mean, I mean, I mean Google, Google had search groundings, which is like their term for it in Gemma 3. Right. Which was.

[A]

Gemma was highly compact. In fact, Google had a new paper about a new quantization technique that apparently they said was very good. And that's what exactly came from.

[D]

Right, Precisely. And Gemma is distills and quantize down Gemini. Right. With some other things removed. And so you can, can you can get a lot out of it. But I think, yeah, to your point, it's important for people to know what is it good for and what is it not good for. Right. And like what it's not going to be good for is doing agentic coding stuff. Right. Like that's, that's not where we're at. Right. No, but in terms of could I either have something that makes a good tool call to get me the latest weather information, or could it control potentially something on my device in a certain way? Sure. Could it give me, you know, basic kind of grammar or speech to text? Text or translation material? Yes. Right. The other thing too is that when you have these smaller models, which again, you're going to be losing some resolution when the more you quantize them. The upside of that is that you could have a model that would be specifically trained for very specific task and that might work really well for that task. But I think it's just kind of people have to think about it in their heads a little bit differently and go, okay, maybe I use this model for this task and this for another. And this, this is where in an ideal world you would have at like an operating system level, a control plane which would know what model to route each task to.

[A]

Yeah. One of our club members, Nightscape, is actually installed a bonsai on his phone. It fits, it's six gigs. So it would fit in an iPhone with 12 gig of RAM. It would take up a lot of that RAM, but it still would fit. And that's why people are very interested in it. But a one bit quantization is usually pretty stupid. It says, I mean, think about it with music. If you had 16 bit samples compared to 8 bit samples and the music, the music wouldn't sound as good. 16 bit is CD quality, 8 bit is not.

[D]

Right.

[A]

And imagine one bit music.

[D]

Well, I think it's more like trying to figure out like, is this 128kbps, you know, which for, you know if it's encoded. Right, right. Like, like, like. But just in music terms, like it was 128k, like encoded MP3 file. Right. With, with like a V0 or whatever the profile would be. Or like a 256k, like AAC file. Right. Like in that case, yes, the 256k AAC file is lossy and it does not sound as good as a 24 bit or a 16 bit, you know, like lossless, like, like Flac or Apple. Apple, you know, audio, you know, like Apple lossless file. But are you actually going to be able to tell the difference, especially if you're listening to it in your Bluetooth headphones?

[A]

Right.

[D]

Honestly, you're probably not. Most people cannot tell the difference once it's about, you know, 128, 256k usually. 256, 320k usually. You can't tell the difference between that and the lossless stuff. That said, it's different for the models and this we just don't know because it's possible in. And who knows? I'm sure that they, what they seem to be saying is that they've created a better type of quantization effort so they can be more efficient, so that their lossiness is better, not as lossy. Exactly right.

[A]

AAC versus MP3.

[D]

Precisely. And so that's, I think what we just have to kind of look at. And I'm sure that there are a lot of companies, including Apple. I'd be shocked if Apple weren't looking at those types of things themselves too because again, like they have their own local models, you know, they've developed, they're putting on device and you want to be able to, especially in these RAM constrained times, be as efficient as you can be with that.

[A]

And I'm sure a lot of effort's being put into that.

[D]

And then also again, you might have multiple models, right? Like that might be the way you get around this, trying to have like. Right? But I'm saying Apple might, right. Rather than having like one big model of s of experts, you might have multiple models. They would have that have different parameter sizes that are on the device that are being called and orchestrated by the os.

[A]

I was talking before the show. I use as you do, a framework 128 gig framework as my main AI, local AI machine. But that's mostly frontier models with my agent Hermes. But I realized last night I thought I have this Mac mini 64 gig, Mac mini M4 Pro. I haven't used much in a while. I could probably use that as a local inference machine. And so I set that up and it's running local models. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point is running this bonsai model. But it is running local models that fit into 64 gigs. But my main agent Hermes on the framework can call it, it said, yeah, if you want something private, so we don't send it out to a frontier model. Or if you have, let's say you have 50 documents you want me to absorb, it'd be easier. It's not gonna be as fast, but who cares? I'm gonna offload it to the Mac Mini. Let it do it now. I should point out one other thing germane to our earlier conversation. The Bonsai model is a highly quantized version of Quinn, the Chinese open weight model. And the reason they can do this is it's an open weight model and so they can just suck it down, get it from hugging face or whatever and run their quantization technology on it. So this is why I'm very excited about open weight. I think that's, that's the future. And I'll check out Bonsai, right? I probably don't want the one bit, but when they do a full eight bit model, say I'll probably run it on my Mac.

[D]

Although, I mean honestly, it'd be interesting to see, right? Like I, I would be interested in being able to play with this, you know, on my phone in some way if you could like have access to it.

[A]

Just ascape to tell us how.

[D]

I was going to say, I was going to say Nightscape. You let us know if it's worth playing with or not. Because honestly, it could be compelling, right. Especially for local on device AI stuff. That could be interesting.

[A]

It could be very interesting, yeah. And this is a very exciting area right now is not only quantization but the mixture of experts technology where you only load a little slice of it into ram. You keep most of it on the hard drive so you can do it in a smaller ram. There's a lot of techniques that are being used right now. In fact, most of the current local models I think are moe mixture of expert models. I know that the quin I'm using is. It's really exciting time actually.

[D]

Yeah. Bonsai claims that in their 27 billion parameter model reaches up to 163 tokens a second in one bit and 134 tokens a second in ternary.

[A]

That's super fast.

[D]

Yeah. And now that's on a 50 90. Okay, so that's if you've got. But, but, but, but, but, but, but this is interesting. On an M5 Max, it reaches up to 87 tokens a second in one bit and 58 tokens a second in Turner race. So that is actually impressive that.

[A]

So why is tokens? Tell me, tell me. Because I think that's not how fast it's thinking. Or is it?

[D]

No, well, I think it's how fast it's typing, it's how fast it's giving you the output. Right. And so you're your blocker. There is usually memory bandwidth and that's why Macs are so good and so much better than other computers because they have the integrated memory and they have very high memory bandwidth, even at the low levels. Right.

[A]

I'm using Ollama that supports mlx, the Macintosh version of this cuda core stuff that Nvidia does. And MLX with models that are tuned for it is very fast, very. It really works beautifully. And of course, all that extra memory bandwidth the Macs have gone of unified memory. This is nice. This is almost 5090 performance level.

[D]

Right? Right. I mean, I mean, you know, it's not as fast, but considering how expensive it is to get a 5090 and that you could do this. Not on a MacBook Neo, to be clear, the memory bandwidth on those machines, because it's a phone, are.

[B]

Right.

[D]

Are not good at all and it's less on a MacBook Air. But if you've got a MacBook Pro,

[A]

especially M4 Pro, just sitting around. Right.

[D]

I was going to say if you've got, if you've got an M4 Pro, if you have some of the older Max machines, machines even like the memory bandwidth on those is such that you can get really good performance. And for people who don't have the space or the time or the inclination or the extra two grand or whatever it is to get a 50 90, it's a compelling option to at least experiment with these things. Is it going to be something that could be for most people, replaced what they're using hosted models for? No, but it's still, you know, very, very viable and certainly much more viable than it was even, you know, two years ago thanks to the explosion of mlx, these improved quantization efforts, the improvements in the open weight models. So it's, it's nice to see.

[A]

Yeah. Let's see, what else shall we talk about? I'm sorry about all the AI talk. I get emails now from people saying why you guys talk about AI? Why do we talk about AI all the time? Christina, tell me why.

[D]

Because one of the stories we have here is actually from the New York Times talking about the rise in number of apps in the App Store and Vibe. Put it out.

[C]

It's doubled.

[D]

It's doubled. And I'm so sorry, but this is one of those things that is defining. It's why our hardware prices are going up. It's defining for better or worse, the direction of how software is being developed and also who's developing it. So I think, I think it's, it's one of those, those topics. I totally get it, people not wanting to be interested in it. But it affects, I think most of us, whether we want it to or not.

[C]

And it's also going to affect Apple. I mean, there's choices that they lost two or three years by choosing the wrong horse to begin with and now every choice they make Today is going to affect what they can do five years from now, ten years from now. They don't have time. They're not in a desperate situation by any means, but they can't afford to. They have to have a good plan and keep executing on that plan time and time again. I mean, one of the things that this story kind of made me think of, and we should, we should qualify that this was an interview that the CEO of this startup did on cnbc, which he said, oh, gosh, yes, Apple's looking at our stuff. Everybody's looking at our stuff. So for a startup that really wants to get the next round of funding, that's things to say. But, but it made me think about, like, are they now at the point where even if someone came at them with, hey, we've got this model that's really, really great and perfect for what you want on the iPhone, would they even be capable of saying, okay, we can, we're going to switch to this now, or would this sort of technology be, well, we are going to buy a company so that we can hire this expertise and access to this technique and use it and we won't see effects from this for the next two or three years. I mean, it's even possible to make that kind of a dramatic shift at this point. Or is it? Is the machinery now the, their mechanism, their infrastructure for evaluating new techniques and building and iterating and improvement much more important than any one status of whatever model they have right now?

[A]

Well, I'll give you an example. Apple has released a speech to text engine, speech analyzer, and I'm looking at benchmarks from inscribe that show it to be fast. I've been using Whisper, which is really excellent. I dictate to my agent all the time.

[D]

Pardon me, Parakeet.

[A]

Parakeet's very good. It's faster than Parakeet. It's faster than Whisper. It is super fast.

[D]

That's awesome.

[A]

Yeah. Both on iOS and Mac OS. Boy, I'd love to see better dictation with Siri.

[D]

I was gonna say, like, I think that if, whatever they replace it with, if they just had, you know, better support. Because I, if I could plug in Whisper for what Siri uses right now, I love Whisper, it would be a lot better. Now, now granted that's going to vary language to language, country to country, but

[A]

yeah, Whisper covers more languages, which is a big deal, but Apple doesn't really care that much because of the whole issue with the eu, so, oh, they're

[C]

going to have to Though.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. At some point. Yeah.

[C]

This is kind of like The Apple Maps versus Google Maps sort of thing where getting 90% there is. It's not easy, but it's very, very attainable. And every single state step beyond that 90%, the finer points become more and more difficult to nail, which is why there's always. Which is why in Apple Maps it's 90% as good as Google Maps except for the times when it is absolutely of no use whatsoever. Because you need to know exactly where the entrance to this building is as opposed to where the address is. And language translation and speech to text is one of those things where it becomes we have all the languages. Not only that, but we know every regional accent. So we are not going to be thrown off off by how a certain word is pronounced three different ways in this within the same country.

[A]

I should mention Inscribe is a company that does transcription summarization using AI. They bill themselves as powered by Apple Intelligence. And one of the reasons they've been benchmarking Speech analyzer is should we use this? And they've said for English we are going to use Speech analyzer. It's by far the fastest for any other language. We'll still use Whisper, which is an OpenAI model. So don't think Apple is out of the running here. They're doing some really good stuff. They're also using AI, maybe even speech analyzer. At the Genius Bar, they are now recording at some of their retail locations the Genius Bar sessions. This is making some people unhappy. This comes from Mark Gurman's Power on newsletter. The system lets Apple Store employees record sessions with an artificial intelligence tool that transcribes and summarizes their conversations with customers. I have to say my doctor does that.

[D]

I was going to say my doctor does this too. So. So I don't love it. But as long as they are actually reliably reviewing the notes after our time together, I'm okay with that.

[A]

Take notes when you're typing and you know, and talking to a customer. So I think it's, it's a good thing to have.

[D]

My only concern would be, I mean, this is the same with my doctor is okay, are we actually going to be putting in the hygiene that they will actually review the notes and approve them and not just accept what the summary said. Right. Because I see this with colleagues all the time where people, you know, you join a meeting and you have a million voice, you know, meeting recorders going on and then you see like the transcript of how it went and sometimes it's right. And then sometimes it's completely off, off. And I'm like, okay, if. I really hope that if somebody, you know, wanted to rely on, on these meeting notes that they actually took a look at it after the meeting and didn't just rely on the, the transcripts.

[A]

Well, employees, according to German, are also concerned that the recordings could be used to coach workers, replace workers, or during performance reviews. But Apple says, no, no, we're not going to save the transcripts and managers aren't going to get them and employees can edit, edit the transcript and summary before saving them to the genius bar system. So, so I think that they are good protections for the employees. By the way, the customer also has

[C]

to agree if Apple had a better track, track record with labor in the Apple stores. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not doubting it. I'm saying that they, they haven't earned that level of trust yet. So they're what, they're right to ask these questions.

[A]

And as long as we're talking about Gurman's Power on newsletter, I, I do have to. This is kind of a sad Mac story. Apple had bigger plans for the Mac Pro before discontinuing it. Of course. You know, I think there may be some question about whether there was a market for the Mac Pro, but they were even thinking about Intel.

[B]

This shows you that they had, I think that there were people inside Apple who were so obsessed with the Mac Pro customers that they had the very tiny number of professional, usually in specific industries, including the entertainment industry sites. And I think when I read this story, I just smell a sales partner kind of relationship where they're like, oh, don't, you know, we sold a thousand of these to editing bays or something like that. And they're making the case of like, oh, and they still have intel stuff. So we need to still make the intel one. Can we bring that back? And it, I mean, I read it as being. Somebody made the case that the tiny, tiny Mac Pro buyer base was worth serving and somebody else did the numbers and said they're not.

[A]

No, no. That's a lot of development you have to do and prototyping. So there were two product numbers according to Gurman. J170, J190. The former was intel based. I mean, to address certain uses.

[B]

Yeah, again, some customer somewhere.

[A]

You know, what was it for a long time, what was the music app that everybody used was only Intel. They didn't, they never. I don't know if they have now.

[B]

So, I mean, this Is the, this is the thing, right? Is, and we've talked about it here a bunch which is it sucks to be in a market that is abandoned by a hardware maker, a software maker, whatever. It sucks to be you. Right. Like, and we've all been there I think at one time or another. But other than an appeal to history and like Apple was. Yes, Apple was once kept alive by high end creative markets. And I think you can see the existence of the Mac Pro as long as it existed as being Apple still acting as if the Mac and Apple existed because of those markets. But it's been decades now since then and when I see a story like this, that's what I keep thinking is there's people inside Apple who are like, but what about the high end creative markets? And finally somebody was like no, we're not going to make a chip for them, we're not going to make a Mac Pro for them. Like there are knowing that it's the highest of the high end, it's the niches of the niche markets for them, them. And if you're in that market, you're really sad that they've abandoned you. But it's very hard not to look at the use case here and say there's no reason to spend that kind of money on custom building hardware for this teeny, teeny, teeny tiny market when you're Apple and you no longer rely on teeny tiny markets to make enormous amounts of money. And by the way also this AI thing is going to come along and that's your new high end market that

[D]

you need to chase. Yeah, yeah. I mean and Jason, you and I were both 27 inch iMac devotees and we, we were kind of, we were kind of caught by that too. Right. And obviously like got my Imac Pro, right? Yeah, one and done. I have my, my, my 27 inch, 2020 iMac that I bought. Even though they'd already announced the Apple silicon. I was like I'm gonna buy this anyway and, and drive it to the end. So yeah, it sucks as you said, to be like left behind. But yeah, I agree with you. I think that this was probably one of those things where there were people who were making the case, but come on.

[B]

And the sales, I mean like if you're on the sales team that's selling to the high end audio studio vendor and you know that like you get a commission maybe and you've got your, your, your, you're trying to advocate for your. I get it, I get that. But what happens in a lot of cases is the sales organizations distort policy for a while because they're like, what do you mean you're going to not do this thing? We need the money. And also you end up with a cultural cachet of like, well, we got to take care of our pro creative users because they're so key to us. And then that lives on, you know, a long time. Sometimes after that market is no longer relevant, it's hard to say goodbye. Look, it's hard, I think, even for people inside a company to say, we are no longer going to focus on you. Like, it's hard for everybody.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

But like I said, I think you could argue that that Mac Pro we should have gotten killed 10 years earlier. Right. But they kept it around and they kept for, I think, a lot of legacy reasons that that became. By the time they killed the Mac Pro, by the time that they even did that first Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

It was clear to everybody that it was irrelevant.

[D]

Yeah. I doubt they even sold out their initial run of that Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Like, I'd be shocked.

[B]

That's why. You know how they didn't announce that it was discontinued? I think literally they were just sitting there. Not because they didn't update it. I think they're just drawing down the warehouse. I think, Christina, I think you're. I think that's exactly the evidence there is that they just kept it on the price list until they were running out of them.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. And then it's out.

[A]

But that's one of Apple's real strengths, is their willingness to abandon legacy. You know, you compare it to Microsoft and they're really good at that. And that's really where they've.

[B]

But it stinks if you're the one getting abandoned.

[A]

But yes, and you're right, the sales organizations are torn because they have loyalty to their customers. That's what they're there for. I understand that. I do. I feel your pain.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Iannako, Jason Snell. Christina Warren. We're so glad you're here. Thanks to all our club members who make this show possible. We appreciate your support. Honestly, without your support, I don't know if this show or many of our shows would be here. We couldn't afford to do it. We don't have. There's no private equity backing. Twit, you're the private equity and we appreciate your support. If you are not yet a member, I'll give you the pitch. It's 10 bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. The ad free versions, by the way, have chapter markings. So you can jump around and skip all the AI stuff if that's what you want. And the reason we can't do that in the ad supported is we used in many cases direct ad insertion ad and those inserted ads are a variable length. So we just don't know. We can't put chapter markers in because we just don't know how long the show will be. But we can do it with the ad free versions and so we do. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a heck of a hang. It is the smartest, bestest place to be if you ask me. I love it. We do a lot of shows just in the club special events. Like we did the photo show on, on Friday. Home Theater Geeks is coming up. Jeff Atwood will be back July 31st for our off by One show. AI User Group is always the first Friday. If, if it's not a holiday, it'll be August 7th. These are all things we do for club members and, and, you know, make bagels, whatever it is. Micah's Crafting Corner. If you're not a member, please. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Consider joining. Supporting independent podcasting. I know you support Andy's website, you support Jason. A lot of people signed up for the history podcast Jason's doing. I love that. I think that's fantastic. Take that money you're giving to Bloomberg and give it to an independent podcast or journal or website because that's where the rubber hits the road. Twit TV Club Twit.

[C]

I don't even have enough intelligence to know how to sell your information to anybody.

[A]

We do not. We cannot, we will not.

[C]

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, principles. But mostly I just have no idea how. You're good, you're safe.

[A]

No idea how to do that.

[C]

Doesn't matter how.

[A]

It's time for the Vision Pro segment. It's gonna be very short today. I had to go to Germany. Germany to get the Vision Pro story of the week. The one. Love that commitment from itboltweiss. Vision OS beta, 90Hz freeze by 24p. I don't know what it means. Let's thank goodness there's Google Translate. I still don't know what it means. Vision OS 27 beta has a 90Hz freeze at 24p. Do you know what that means? Jason Snell, do you have the new Vision Pro OS Beta?

[B]

Is this literally somebody complaining about a bug in the developer beta?

[A]

It's efficient OS beta reports of jerkback. That's a good translation. Jerkback. I think they mean, you know, jumping frames show title in the Jerkback in the video playback accumulate. The refresh rate should then remain rigid at 90 hertz. I don't know what it means. It sounds.

[B]

So there's. I think.

[A]

I think this is a mistranslation in which film typical Jews become visible.

[B]

Oh no.

[A]

Oh no. Maybe this is the wrong site.

[D]

This is.

[A]

I am sorry. What the hell is going on?

[B]

It's. It's. Germans are. Germans are finding bugs in. In developer betas is what that's.

[A]

Yeah, let's just leave it at that. And that is your Vision Pro segment. I should have read the translation before I did the story, I guess.

[D]

Hey hey. Nightscape in the chat has been working on creating on Bonsai. Yeah it's actually. I don't know if Banzai. He's working on doing a local first way to code Vision Pro apps. So. Hey.

[A]

Oh, Nightscape. Rock on.

[D]

I was going to say you should productize that Nightscape like for all five Vision Pro developers, but I'm not even joking. That'd be cool.

[B]

That was actually a Mark Gurman rumor a while ago. Is one of the things that they were working on for Vision Pro was the ability to write to basically to Vibe code. He had to explain what it was. We didn't even have the term yet. And I think some of that is what's in the type to make a shortcut to describe a shortcut feature in 27. But yeah, I mean, sure. One way to deal with the limitations of of the apps and user base on the Vision Pro would be to Vibe code your own Vision Pro app.

[A]

Well, Vibe Coding has jammed the App Store twice as many submissions this year as previous years. The New York Times says Vibe coded apps are flooding the App Store. Is that good for Apple? They highlight one particular developer, a developer in Chicago, Marco Perez, who had never made a mobile app before. He spent five weeks tinkering with Vibe Coding AI tools tools to create a prototype for Info drizzle, which the time says has been modestly successful. $500 in profit, 1300 downloads. But you know what? That's not bad. But then in May he released Stampa, which was a scrapbooking app that turns photos into digital postage stamps. And now $3,000 in profit, 20,000 downloads. I think there are a lot of people who would be very happy with that. And the fact that Apple's approving them means Apple's happy to get Those. Right. They don't have to approve those.

[C]

Mostly, I think the problem. It would be a bigger problem if Apple decides that they haven't. They want to put an editorial control over what deserves to. What does what deserves to be in the App Store, what does not beyond a simple threshold of. Is this about. Does this create value for the customer or does it not? We don't want to a. I think, would be correct for them to say, okay, look, thank you for submitting the 1000th markdown editor. Today you get a free hat, but we're not allowing you in the App Store. But on the other hand, if someone basically Vibe coded a tool that does one simple thing because they run a bowling alley, and it frustrates them that this task of running the bowling alley is so difficult, well, they shouldn't be saying that this app shouldn't exist. They should make it available. If anything, this demonstrates Apple's. The App Store's shortcoming for discovery. They should be adding more tools that allow customers to find the app they want. And when the search result gives them 12 different candidates to basically sift through them and figure out, I feel as though this one, I want to try out these two, and this one will probably have the most value to me, which is something that I don't think the App Store really does very well right now.

[A]

A spokesperson for Apple. I'm sorry, Jim. We are thrilled to see a new generation of developers embracing the latest tools to build and ship apps faster than ever. And then to the accusation that Apple only cares if you get downloads because that's the way they make money. All apps are held to the same high standards for quality, privacy, and security that users have come to trust. So I guess that means Apple says,

[D]

okay, well, I mean, I think this is also good for them because the number of conversations I've had with people. One of my good friends is a longtime Windows user and Windows developer, and because she's been Vibe coding so much, she's been, you know, building mobile apps. And then she's like, okay, well, I built this app and it's not even native, is. It's. It's probably using React or something, but, you know, she wants to publish it in the App Store. And she's like, how do I publish in the App Store without a Mac? And I'm like, okay, well, you can, but it, it takes a lot of work, and it's easier if you just, you know, buy a MacBook Air and, or, or, or buy.

[A]

Or get a Neo right or, Or

[D]

Neo right I'm, you know, I'm just thinking like, could you do it with a phone?

[A]

Can you submit to the phone?

[D]

No.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And that's actually the one area where I get a little bit like frustrated with Apple of their position on Vive coding is that the apps themselves that will let you vibe code on a phone and then submit, like they're like, oh no, no, we can't use our phone or iPads like their computers, even though those chips are now inside computers that we sell. The difference in the operating system is so vast, you guys. We can't possibly let you use your tools to create things on the platform that you're going to consume it on, on. But, you know, but a lot of people I think who are, maybe they're experienced developers, maybe they are people who are brand new at it, like it can open up. You've had an idea for an application for a long time, something that just fits your needs. To Andy's point. Now I can do this in a much more manageable way. That's not going to take all of my time. And so I'm going to need to buy that hundred dollar Apple developer subscription. I'm going to need to make sure that I have a map Mac that can submit and test my apps. That brings people further into the ecosystem, which I think is only a good thing.

[C]

More points of view always make things better. There are people with all kinds of backgrounds who a generation ago are absolutely shut out because they didn't have access to the tools. It cost a lot of money to do this. It costs a lot of years of investment of time to figure out the technology. But we're hearing about the need we're seeing of classes of apps that address needs from communities that have absolutely never been addressed before and that should be absolutely encouraged. It's one of the great things about, about modern development.

[A]

Well, okay. It also makes it hard to find stuff in the App Store and I

[C]

imagine that's a fault of the App Store.

[B]

Yeah, this, this is all, all these questions about like, oh, what does this mean for Apple's approval process and test flight and App Store search?

[A]

Jam them up.

[B]

And the answer is this is an opportunity for Apple, but they're going to have to step up and they're going to have to do better. And that's a problem because a lot of these areas are areas where Apple has been, shall we say, a little lax in trying to improve the infrastructure. They took the App Store success for granted and it's hard to make changes when you're just making money hand over fist. But like they need to do more work on App Store approvals, they need to do more work on search and discovery and be better at all of that because those systems are not very good.

[C]

Yeah, I've always felt like the entire apps apps development stack, some development relations to the store, that's the most un Apple thing, maybe the only truly unapple thing about Apple's business. I don't think they run that at the same level. They tend to invest in pretty much anything else. And it always surprises me.

[A]

Yeah, this is interesting. In the New York Times story, it has estimates by app figures that Apple collected $34.21 billion last year in revenue from the $114 billion in in app purchases. If that's accurate, and I have no reason to believe it's not, that's astounding.

[B]

That's where the money is. Yeah, that New York Times story is very funny because they're there because the New York Times is very concerned. One of their, one of their concerns was that the Vibe coding apps were not going to be as profitable for Apple because it's harder to do in app purchase and that's where they make all their real money. And a lot of these Vibe coded apps are kind of for chump change and Apple's not going to make a profit on them. But it is true. If we're saying Apple should invest a lot more money in making the App Store better and they're like, but wait, it's because of this influx of apps that doesn't make us any money. I could see that that's a problem. My solution again, it's a classic. This happens a lot when people talk about Apple. There are people out there who believe that Apple can do no wrong. They're amazing. They're the most incredible company ever. Don't stop them. But if there's a thing that Apple doesn't do, they're like, well, that's impossible. Obviously Apple could never. And it's like, well, wait a second. Is Apple great or are they incapable of solving even moderately hard problems? Because I would look at this and say, hey Apple, here's an opportunity to make your cockamamie in app purchase system work better for developers. So it's easier to vibe code an in app purchase subscription. How about that as an idea? Maybe that would be a good idea.

[A]

Is it hard to put that into the.

[B]

It's a mess. It's hard to test. If you talk to developers, adding the subscription stuff and then gating features and all of that. It gets tricky and I've never tried it with a Vibe coded app before but like I know from talking to human developers that it's really tricky. And again, is that not an opportunity for revenue optimization? I think right now Apple's point would be we think that the developers who are building in app purchase are motivated by the money that they'll make and therefore they will put up with our stuff 100% in the long run. Especially when you're lowering the bar with Vibe coders. Maybe you actually need to make it easier to use this.

[C]

Yeah, I mean that's my big. That's why I just frustrates me it didn't surprises me if they're were an area of customers, let's call it like education, like sports, like people in a certain geographical reason that's responsible for billions and billions and billions of dollars of Apple revenue. My goodness, they would be treating them like kings and queens and this other stuff. It's very weird to me that the customers, the users who develop apps who are generating these billions and billions and billions of dollars of apps, they're not treated with indifference or disdain. But every time the developers for years have said, gee, it would really help us out if you could add this feature to the App Store, if we could monetize this way or this API, it really is bugging us and it really is forcing us to put a lot more effort into this that we would much rather spend time adding the features that our users have been clamoring for for years. But we can't because we don't have the time and the resources because we have to develop it towards dealing with these APIs that don't really work very well. Again, developers are their customers as well. They're customers of the App Store and without them they're also customers that make them a lot of money and they should be treated a lot better than they're being treated well.

[A]

I tell you what, if you're a Brazilian user, you may love the App Store. Download a navigation, travel or weather app and as soon as it sees your IP address it goes oh hey, by the way, you want to gamble? This is an example from a 9 to 5 Mac of potato Plot Puzzle, which is it looks like a dumb growing game, but as soon as it sees that you're in Brazil, it turns into convidio amigos 66.

[C]

66.

[A]

When, when, when I don't know, that's I, I, it's not any language. All I really know is go. But that's not useful here. Anyway, that is a very clever way of hiding a gambling app. You know, just check the IP address and then reveal your true nature.

[B]

Yeah, this is. I mean, Jon Gruber has been on this point for a while on Daring Fireball, and I think he's right, which is, look, you can't necessarily catch all these guys, but when you've got like multiple apps in the top 10 in Brazil that are these kinds of apps, apps. Gruber's point is, why is there not an investigation squad inside the App Store that is actively seeking out fraudulent apps that have gotten successful and getting them kicked out of the store?

[A]

Nine to five. Max says there are 60 apps that do this.

[B]

60? Yeah. And yeah, it's infuriating. And this is that thing where we, you know, we hear these stories about innocent developers getting their apps rejected for all these little things and then these sham apps just get, you know, get let through and high up on the charts and nobody seems to care. It's. It's bad. I, Yeah, I want, I want Jon Gruber's bunko squad for the App Store. The people who are just going around looking for fraud, fraud apps and kicking them out. That's. That's the way you do this. Right. It can't all be happening in the scan up front. It's got. You got to have some investigators who are actually doing the work to find this stuff and pull it out. Because. And this is my argument. And you're like, well, maybe they, maybe they don't care. Maybe they like it. Maybe they're making money off of it. That. Okay, but one of Apple's key arguments whenever it talks about. To regulators about the App Store.

[D]

Yep.

[B]

Is that it's curated and that can't

[D]

have it both ways.

[B]

And you can't have it both ways.

[D]

Can't have it both ways.

[C]

And this is. I hate to bring this up a third or fourth time, but again, $5 trillion company they have. They can't say that. They can definitely say that we can't solve this problem, but they have the resources to do whatever it is that they've decided as a priority for this part of their business. So if this is. Is if this is not happening, then that's not a priority. Exactly. And they shouldn't argue that. They should argue that their hand, their hands are tight.

[D]

That's what's always bothered me. Is this speaking outside of both sides of your mouth. Because I'm okay if you say this is not a priority and we are not going to police this. I'm okay, if that's the statement that you say. But if you say that then you need to also not say, oh, but the App Store has to be the only place you buy apps because only, only we can protect you and only we are the ones once you can sanction this. Right. Like you can't make both arguments. I will say and I fully agree with Jason and John Gruber. Like I would like to have a bunco squad and have people who are empowered to look at trends and analysis and investigate apps and hey, this looks kind of fishy. And also maybe even do more about banning developers once they've been kicked out and prevent them from coming back again because we know that they come back time and time again. But I do wonder if at least for some of the, this stuff, if some of the automations and things like AI and some of the latest frontier models could improve at least some of these scanning techniques. Right. Like, I would not be opposed to that. I would like to see both, I would like to see more humans involved. But I also feel like if you're noticing patterns like this, this might be something like that you could run through a routine of tests in your automation scan that maybe now that's a thing that you add in which is, okay, we're going to try accessing this from a different IP address from a different, different region and see if we get different results.

[C]

Yeah. And this is super important because we can define what addiction means. And of course it's correct and incorrect to say that the phone is the most addictive substance because it is a machine designed to keep us pecking at buttons. But when you add that, when you add an online betting app to that situation where the exact same things that get kids to keep buying in game purchases because they hit them with the right offer at the right time, when you add to that, oh, it's a betting betting app that actually cost people real money. This really becomes when the company, the comparison to the tobacco industry becomes very, very, very apt. Apple should be absolutely livid about, excuse me, absolutely defensive about making sure that they don't get this sort of reputation. And it's why every time this kind of story comes up, I remind myself and others, if you go to the official Apple sports app, they have DraftKings stuff right in there. They not not links directly to the app, but they want to make sure that hey, here's what the betting on. Here's like the, here's the branding, here's the logo of DraftKings so that you're reminded that right. If you keep swipe. If you swipe up and left, you'll be able to get right back into your betting app. It is to me, Apple is not. This is one of the few areas in which Apple I feel is doing something that is absolutely unethical. There is no reason for them to do it. They can't be making so much money off of this or is getting so much traction from this app because of this that it is worse worth being part of a problem that is constantly, constantly being identified as a destroyer of people.

[A]

I am the destroyer of the Brazilian language. And I apologize to all on sundry. I hesitate to tell you this, but the city of San Francisco says Apple should take down at least eight nudify apps that are on the App Store and they should really, really should. Yeah. And there are at Apple is the city attorney says stop profiting from 13 face swap apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls. I agree. Take them down. And how did they get on there in the first place anyway? This is the problem. It's just inconsistent. And by the way, Google also has been ceased and desisted.

[B]

I think where we all probably agree, I mean, and Apple, it's not only strategic that they need to do this, but like this is where I say this is where Apple's a cheapskate. Like Apple makes a lot of money and they built this thing from nothing, but they also didn't really scale it because they felt like they didn't need to. And I think there's some cultural baggage there. Apple also, we've talked about here many times, has issues with hiring. They don't hire people. People very well, they don't hire a lot of people. They're really reluctant to hire people. And I don't know, like you look at the size and scope of the App Store and I don't know how many people are working there, but I would bet you it sure seems from the outside like it's not enough in these areas. Like it's just not enough people. And that is a cultural thing at Apple too, which is they're, they're lightly staffed compared to what you'd think they'd be for. And this is where it starts to get to be kind of ugly in areas like this. And you know, you need leadership. Who's going to say yeah, you're right, we're not doing enough in these areas in the App Store. But they also don't invest. You know, their search engine isn't very good. And like, but they're Happy to put another search ad in there. So again, it's, it's priorities. This is not even, I would even say this is not even a hard problem to solve. It just requires somebody who wants to solve it. And it's all unclear how hard Apple wants to work to solve it.

[C]

Yeah, Apple, Apple is the. Multiple times over the past two or three months have been hit with Russian banking apps that of course they can't host these apps in the Russian App Store because of sanctions. But hey, why don't we just call this a messaging app or why don't we just call this a pocket calculator? And it gets through and then a signal gets sent after it gets approved for the app store that turns it into a banking app. Like, how did that get through? How did that get approved? It's a, they have a holistic fundamental problem with the, with app reviews that they absolutely need to address. And like you said, it's not that they don't care about it, it's that they clearly have not decided the right person has not jumped up and down on the right table in the right office to say we, we need the resource. We need to spend the resources and time to finally solve this. Whatever we do to wherever we thought was solving this problem five or ten years ago ain't cutting it.

[A]

All right, let's take a little break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Jason Snell is here, 6colors.com. Have you recorded your first history, a podcast yet, or are you.

[B]

Yeah, we've recorded. We did a recording last week, so we're, we're on the, on the, in the process of recording our, our series and all that and doing it in advance is kind of nice. So.

[A]

Yeah, where, where can people find it if they want?

[B]

Yeah. Check it out at Designed fm and right now that'll go to the Kickstarter page where you can, you can become a member there and then over time that will turn into the show. We're going to launch the RSS feed in August sometime with the episodes previously posted. And then I think in September we'll start rolling out new episodes.

[A]

So the people are getting it now are people who went to the Kickstarter

[B]

and they're not getting anything now. We did the preview episodes and upgrade. The podcast doesn't launch until September, early September, but we did a bunch of sample episodes so you can. Yeah, right now there's only the sample episodes to listen to, but we're already producing new episodes that will go out. One of the beauties of doing a history Podcast is we don't have the thing where we record and then post it the next day or the same day we're going to record and then post it and you know, we're going to get ahead. We're going to be weeks ahead.

[C]

It's not that anything new will have happened in 1984.

[B]

Breaking news.

[C]

You can reliably record that and put it to. Put it in inventory.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Apple is still going to buy next. It's still gonna happen.

[C]

The people who pay for it should be able to get that information. Come on.

[B]

Yeah, they will. They will.

[A]

In my studio I have the original Paul Rand Next poster that Steve Jobs commissioned.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

That was given to me I think in the late 90s. I can't remember when it was given to me, but it's an original. It's signed by Rand.

[D]

That's amazing.

[A]

Yeah, it's really cool. That's Christina Warren. She's amazing. Amazing. She's film girl at developer relations at GitHub.

[D]

I'm not as cool as Rand. Right. Like having a signed Rand poster. I think that's pretty, that's pretty nice. That's pretty, that's, that's pretty amazing.

[A]

Yeah. I don't know if it's worth anything, but I like, I mean it's worth something to me.

[D]

Let's put it, I was gonna say I, I, I think it'd be worth something to any of us in this audience. That's pretty, pretty killer.

[A]

Yeah. Andy and Ako also with us from the library where there is a signed copy some somewhere in there of little widow women. Louisa May Alcott stopped by. She signed it. If you find it, it could be worth something. Andy. I'm just saying.

[C]

Well, I'll go look it up and if it isn't signed, I'll sign it myself.

[A]

Well, that's always the problem, isn't it? You're watching Back Break Weekly. And now ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, time for our picks of the week. Mr. Snell, why don't you kick it off?

[B]

All right. I decided to go with an appliance. So this is a more of an Alex priced pick. At $329 it is favorite. It is my favorite appliance. I love it. I love a gadget. My kids will tell you I love a kitchen gadget, but I drink tea and not coffee. When I was a kid, my parents had a coffee maker that ground the beans and woke me up at six in the morning and all of that and making tea. The fact is when you make tea you got to take the tea out after three minutes or four minutes, whatever it is, whatever your preference is, or it gets all bitter and bad. And so for the last 10 plus years, I have used and loved the Breville One Touch tea maker. It is a kettle, but it has a little basket on a magnetic pole.

[A]

I have a Breville kettle, but this I must get.

[B]

And so you can. The night before, we fill it up with water and we put tea leaves in the basket and you let it sit there overnight. And then at 6:30 in the morning, the water boils, the basket drops in, it stays in there for about three and a half minutes and then it comes back out. So when we wander out halfway.

[A]

Oh, so it does the timing and

[B]

everything, it does everything. You have tea without any tea leaves getting bad and making it all bitter. It all just happens automatically. And yes, it will work as a normal kettle. You can, you can make it anywhere and you can set it to be. The tea can be in for as long as you want and it will, it will heat the water to whatever your target temperature is. So if you like different styles of tea, you can, you can dial that in. And for us, it's basically black tea in the morning. And so it's boil the water, drop it in for three and a half minutes, pull it back out and then you wander out a little later and the tea is already having to fiddle with it.

[A]

My little gloved finger is hanging out over the Buy now button. I really.

[B]

It's just a great pricey, it's not cheap, it's not cheap, but I love it. It was totally worth it for me. I have no zero regrets. There's one of my favorite gadgets. If you're a tea drinker and if you like the idea that you have a machine. Also, just in general, if you're making tea, even if you don't time it, it's kind of nice because if you make tea, you got to wait for the water to boil and then you got to put in the water in the tea. Then you got to set a timer. Summer, you gotta leave, but don't go too far because then you gotta come back and all that. What if you could press a button and the tea would just beep when it was done? That is the Breville One Touch T Mix.

[C]

Jason, can I, can I suggest one modification? Because this is, this was something that I did like four or five years ago that changed my witches in a positive way. Put the kettle on the nightstand.

[B]

Oh, I mean, well, it's noisy though. It's noisy.

[C]

No, no, no, no. Well, okay.

[A]

Well, I'm gonna put a George Foreman and grill on the night.

[B]

I can hear it.

[A]

I can have bacon in the morning.

[B]

I can hear it off in the distance in. In my kitchen from the back when I wake up.

[A]

It gets you out of bed.

[B]

It's a pleasant.

[A]

Some people want to get up.

[B]

I actually have to drink tea without eating something or my stomach gets all wookie. So. So yeah, I have to get out to the kitchen anyway.

[C]

I mean, for me, it's like I'll. I'll wake up as a gee. If I fully wake up, I can have tea in like three and a half minutes versus like if I have to walk to the kitchen. It's like, you know what, maybe I'll sleep for another 20 minutes and then it's 11am and it keeps it warm

[B]

too, for up to an hour. It'll keep it. It'll hold it a temp. So that's also good.

[A]

Very nice.

[B]

I love it.

[A]

I still though the price is.

[B]

I know

[C]

you gotta give yourself a little nod of kindness sometimes and people,

[B]

people will sometimes be like, oh yeah, Jason is ridiculous tea maker. It's like, I know so many people who have automatic coffee makers. Makers. This is no different.

[A]

You're right.

[B]

It's just for tea instead of.

[A]

I've spent 10 times this on an espresso machine from Brazil.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Well, not quite ten times, but close.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I know multiple people with thousand dollar ish Breville espresso makers. So come on.

[A]

Yeah, you're right. This is just tea though. That's the Ms. Christina Warren, your pick of the week.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

So this is one that I actually came up with. I saw it earlier this week and then I thought about it based on our discussion that we had before the show started, which is you're talking about repurposing local models on your Mac Mini.

[A]

Yes, and I'm using Ollama, which I

[D]

don't want to use, but something better. So my suggestion for you, there are a couple things. LM Studio is obviously one thing that you can use, and that's pretty good.

[A]

I don't need a GUI though, because it's headless.

[D]

Right, okay. All right, well, so this is. This one is a gui, so maybe it isn't for you, but it might be interesting for some other folks. And this is called Native N A T I V. And it is built by the guy who basically created the library that LM Studio runs the top of.

[A]

Yeah, I think LM Studio is fantastic.

[D]

Yeah. But this is actually, it's on GitHub, it's open source, it's MIT licensed, and the guy that basically created this library that LM Studio is based on top of has created.

[A]

Oh, but this also has a interface. Yeah, a chat interface.

[D]

Yes, it's Apple Silicon and it's Apple Silicon, and it's. It's because he maintains the library, I think that it's pretty good. And so for you, it might not be. It might not fit exactly what you're wanting to do, since you're doing it headless. But for other folks out there, it's worth looking at because you can use your own agents and things with it models. It'll tell you what model will work best on your system based on what's there. And so the reason that there are a lot of these things out there, but the fact that, that the guy that develops the library that so many other local modeling things now has his own native app, the, you know, coincidentally called Native, I wanted to give that one a shout out.

[A]

And you definitely want to run an app if you're going to do local models that do sports mlx, you really want to take advantage of that.

[D]

Yeah. You want to use MLX if you can. And so he makes it easy to get those things. And so, yeah, that's nice.

[A]

So I pick Native without an E and it's at B, A, I, z, z, y, GitHub, IO native. You know, just Google Native.

[D]

I was going to say just, just Google Native, because I don't think the URL is great. Yeah, but it's. Yeah, it's free.

[A]

It's open source.

[D]

It's free. Open source. The first release came out yesterday. I saw it on Hacker News, and there's already been, you know, more pushes in the last couple of hours. So. So it's, it's obviously getting a lot of things. It's built with Swift, is powered by MLX. It does require Mac OS 26 or higher. So if you're somebody who's still like me, stuck on Sequoia on some of your machines for reasons you'll be left out. But yeah, this looks like a good

[A]

replacement, frankly, for LM Studio because it's so Mac native. LM Studios. A little bit.

[D]

Exactly.

[A]

Andy Inacco, Pick of the week.

[C]

I have two picks and they're both things to stick on your MacBook. First. First off, the only thing that I'm disappointed by my new M5 MacBook Pro over my M1 MacBook is that I had and have the most awesome David Bowie sticker on the lid of it. And it's still available. It's three bucks. I'm sorry, I got the prices wrong here. On the. It's three bucks. You can order it. And it's this five inch wide sticker that matches up the David Bowie lightning bolt logo with the classic NASA logo. And the number of times.

[D]

Oh, that's so cool.

[C]

The number of times in this library and elsewhere where someone would walk by, stop, turn back, and then say, oh my God, that's an awesome sticker. And I've said it's available online. And unfortunately. And it's so perfect. And unfortunately, I thought about, about just, I have a bunch of them because they're so nice. I. Every time one wore out on the old one, I would simply scrape it off and put a new one back on it. I kind of thought about putting it on the new MacBook, but it seemed like that's like, you know, that's like getting the. Putting the same collar on another dog. It's like, no, that neckerchief was Rusty's thing. This is a new dog. And so what I did was. But I did want to do something. So I, I. For the first time, I got an actual skin, a vinyl skin from dbrand to get my M5 MacBook Pro and make it look kind of bright and shiny and orange and colorful. And also make sure that when I go through airport security, it's not gonna be quite so easy for someone to mix up their MacBook with mine. There's a lot of stuff.

[A]

You're not one of those people that says Buoy instead of Bowie, are you?

[C]

You know What, Jack? In 1982, 1983, I still remember the local, the. The local anchorman Jack, someone of, of Ch. Of Channel 4. David Bowie was playing at the, at the Patriot Stadium. And he kept. David Buoy is reporting for the like. And I said, oh my God, it's David Bowie.

[A]

You're wrong.

[C]

You're so not hip, man. Unlike us Generation X types. So yeah, I always say Bowie, good man, man.

[A]

Exactly. But that's not the only thing to put on your Mac.

[C]

Exactly. So. So I got, so I got the dbrand skin. There are a lot of makers out there. I chose dbrand chiefly because I've seen a lot of videos around about them. The number one, it's not just like. It is a vinyl skin. So it won't add weight to the, to the lid. It won't wear out the. Won't wear out the hinge it won't cause any sort of damage. I've seen videos of people peeling them off and unlike other vinyls, they, they peel off very, very cleanly. So it will protect the lid from scratches. But if you decide to take it off, it's not as though it's gonna have to scrape it off or anything like that. It won't leave behind any sort of residue. The other reasons for picking, for picking it is that it's a special kind of vinyl where it actually lets air pass through. So you're not going to be constantly scraping air bubbles from, from the middle of it. Also, you can just buy the lid. They, they offer skins will. That will wrap pretty much the entire part, the entire MacBook. But they will also just sell you the part just for the lid, which is all I wanted. It's very, very easy to put in. You can actually. It's not. One shot and you're done and one chance and that's it. You can actually keep peeling it up and removing it and putting it back on. Peeling up, putting it back on. The hole that lets the Apple logo shine through is actually a little bit larger than the Apple logo. So it's not as though you have to line it. It up perfectly or else you'll get an edge from the original metal shining through. And it's held up. It looks very, very nice. You have to put.

[A]

Which one do you have?

[C]

I have the orange one. I think it's the same color as we all love.

[A]

Cosmic orange.

[C]

Yeah. I actually bought it because I didn't want weird patterns or anything like that. I just wanted a bright, shiny color kind of like, I want the, I want the. I wish they'd come out with a line of just all the MacBook Neo colors because I would have gotten the citrus for like, like nothing else.

[A]

I'm tempted by the clear one that you see looks like you're seeing through the COVID That looks kind of cool.

[C]

They got, they, they, they got some nice stuff. And also it really is map or. Yeah, yeah. Now the, the advertising is kind of annoying, but you have to put it. I think that's kind of their brand. But as I said, I'm, I'm very happy with this. Not that none of the things I was afraid of, which is that again, it'll just, just. It'll be so impossible to. You line it up and then you get what you get. You can actually lift it up and reposition it several times before. Basically I was able to reposition it until I got sick of repositioning It. The only complaint that I have, which is barely a complaint, is that it really is designed to fit the lid of a MacBook Pro with maybe half a millimeter to spare. So once you have it on, it almost looks like it's factory. But it also means that, that it's either you've either got it exactly right or it's off by just enough that it will, you know, that it will annoy you for the rest of your life if you don't peel it up and try it again. So it was literally like eight or nine or ten times before I got it, like so close. I said, okay, I will not be cursing myself for the life of this device or the life of this skin if I, if I leave it like that. But once you got it good, it's good. So good.

[A]

There are pictures shared with Twit of the two different laptops that Andrew has customized beautifully.

[C]

You almost hate to lose the stickers. It's like, oh man, it's like tattoos, like on a middle aged person where you can think about the circumstances under which you got each one of those and maybe you regret one or two of them, but it's part of the story.

[D]

No, it's so true. I take photos of my laptops after, like I get rid of them or whatever and I have to take, I either the stickers off or send them back. If they're a company laptop or whatever, I take a photo just so I can commemorate. But you're right, like, it's so hard. I know some people put like clear, I guess, like covers on top of their laptops and then put the stickers on that and that way they can keep it and like that. That's cool. I've just, I've just never done that. I've never been that smart to do that. But. But your skin looks great, Andy. I've, I've often thought about buying. I bought their skins for other things.

[A]

Do you hear that a lot?

[B]

Exfoliate that a lot.

[A]

Your skin looks great.

[D]

Okay.

[A]

Is it the lotion?

[C]

I've never seen the combination of blue and green in a skin tone before.

[A]

Your night routine.

[B]

Yeah. Loofah.

[A]

It's loofah. It's all about the loofah.

[D]

It's all about the loofah. All about the moisturizer.

[A]

Christina Warren, thank you so much, Film girl. We're so glad to have you here on MacBreak Weekly every week. It's great to see you and thank you for your input. I have installed Orb stack and all the other things on my now headless Mac Mini. Thank you. You can find her at GitHub as Film Girl. And of course here every Tuesday. Andy Inocco. Find him at the library. But you know, he is online now. He's got a website. I H N A T K o dot com. Become a premium member and the gods will smile upon you. Jason Snell has many podcasts, but this one is his sixcolors.com. jason for upgrade. I'm sure the history podcast will be in California.

[B]

It's on the list. Yeah, it's there. I added it. You're the number one user of that page, Leo. That's why I am I really up today. Yes. I made it for you because you're like, Jason, I don't have a place where I can say all your podcasts are.

[A]

So that's it. I need somewhere to send someone because he has so many. Gosh darn it.

[B]

I know. It's true.

[A]

Upgrade Design in California. The incomparable mothership. Mac Break Weekly. Robot or not, Six colors. The incomparable game show. And that's just the beginning.

[B]

Just the beginning. There's so many and so, so many more.

[C]

You're like an F1 car with like a million sponsor stickers.

[B]

You know, it's hard out here for an independent content creator. You gotta do what you gotta do.

[A]

Thank you all for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in the club Twit, Discord, of course, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kickstart on Demand versions of the show available at the website, Twitter, TV, MBW. You also can find us on YouTube. That's video, of course. Best way to get the show, though, subscribe, and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. I'm rushing because I have two minutes before Jason has to leave and I'm going. I made it.

[B]

You did it.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

That's because we didn't do a hydration break. You will see us next week on, I hope right here. But meantime, it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you you got to get back to work now because break time is over. See you next.