MacBreak Weekly 932 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell all in the house. Jason already has iOS 18.1 featuring Apple Intelligence. He'll talk about what it's like and why you probably aren't going to be getting it until after the new iPhone comes out. We'll also talk about the first Apple Store going union Never thought that would happen and Apple TV Plus our ads in its future. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

0:00:32 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

00:00:42  - Leo Laporte

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 932, recorded Tuesday, July 30th 2024. iPhone says what. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple. And we are doing this today in a new fashion, getting ready for a whole new regime, regime TWiT 4.0. I think we'll call this uh. So we are using uh today we're using our new setup with uh zoom, iso and uh e-cam, and John Ashley is pretending to be at home, but he's actually just down the hall but he's, but he's got a like a home computer set up and this is so this may look a little different, maybe a little weird. We'll see. Uh, the what the biggest thing most people will notice if you're watching videos the lower thirds have somehow become lower 18ths. That's just. That's just the way it's going to be. Um, uh, I think otherwise it should sound the same and, uh, it should pretty much look the same. Let me introduce the panel. You hear Andy Ihnatko from the library. Andrew, good to see you.

0:01:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Wgbh in Boston very good to be here. It feels like. It feels like you're, like he's in the lunar Sim, like the Apollo program, like where they're going through every he's. He's actually on base, but actually we're pretending that he's like 100 miles from landing.

0:02:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm in a centrifuge right now in my uh. Yeah, this is preparatory to me taking the whole thing home, uh and shutting down the studio, which is still on schedule for a week from uh Thursday, so our first twit will be august, uh 11th out of the out of the addicts through the new attic studio using this technology and the way. Reason we're kind of set trying this is because I will not be the technical director. Our producer, John Ashley, will be the technical director and producer, as he has been. He just won't be in a tri-caster, he'll be in a setup at his house. So this, we'll see this, this, uh, I think it should work and it will save us umpteen millions of dollars. So that's a good thing, Jason Snell, and, by the way, you're all doing it, so why shouldn't I? Jason Snell's?

0:02:55 - Alex Lindsay
in his beautiful home studio hello Leo, hello hi Andy, hello Alex. This is told by days. I'm gotten some amalan podcast about design the soviets.

0:03:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, wait a second oh my god, sorry, sorry, you're only traveling for a week. I thought we were changing the show to german.

0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
What? Happened I didn't get that 5.0, that'll be okay, nice to see you, Jason Jason are you no so? You're going to be, uh, coming to the last show in the studio, or one of the last shows.

0:03:24 - Alex Lindsay
I think I'm going to Twitter on Sunday. Sunday, a week from Sunday.

0:03:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or this Sunday, yeah, yeah. Gosh, it's weird. No, it's yes, this Sunday. In fact, that's going to be the very special Vision Pro version. Alex Lindsay was in-house last Sunday and took some pictures and it all.

0:03:44 - Jason Snell
We did a handful of people watching on Envision Pros and they all gave it a big thumbs up, said it looked good. So I was trying to figure out framing and then working with John and Burke on just the interface stuff because we want to get a solid program into the phone and everything else, and so everything seems to be pretty well set up. So we're pretty excited about Sunday.

0:04:02 - Leo Laporte
And you have asked my team to make this more three dimensional. So we have live people in studio, but we will also have stuff on the table, to kind of give it three dimensions the.

0:04:14 - Jason Snell
You know the. The thing that makes 3d really feel good is to is to have lots of stuff in the foreground so that you can see stuff. So I was like, hey, if we can find you know we don't want to make- it crazy or messy, but dude, if you have a couple things I know we looked at it so so we were like if we throw a couple things in there, it'll just feel it'll give it a little bit more muchness well, more muchness is on its way.

0:04:34 - Leo Laporte
My team is gathering the muchness excellent spreading it. Yeah exactly, show title gathering spreading the muchness all over my studio um, apple, apple, apple, oh Apple. Well, the big story, I guess I don't think it's that big a story. I think it's kind of what we thought. Mark Gurman on Sunday said Apple is not going to release Apple intelligence with the new iPhone. They're going to release it, uh, in an 18.1 version, maybe inober. It doesn't surprise me somehow.

0:05:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe I should be yeah, remember that when they went through it, there was a lot of avoidance of specific dates and with a lot of the specific features of apple intelligence, particularly the enhancements to shlomo where it understands like all of the data that you've been giving it, they said the best could be coming next year anyway, so that's not terribly surprising actually. I actually thought I saw that uh 18.1 dropped for developers today and this week and it had a lot of Apple intelligence features, yeah, but none of the like those advanced things. I think I was it, mark German or might be someone else who said it's probably going to be not till 18.4 sometime in the spring yeah, there's a.

0:05:42 - Alex Lindsay
There's a lot going on here, right? We're used to these betas. I mean there's two betas happening now there's 18.0 and 18.1, and they're happening simultaneously. And is 18.1 just 18.0, with Apple intelligence turned on? Sounds like it is, until Apple tells us otherwise. You know, I couldn't get a straight answer from them about whether that's the case. I think that is probably the goal, so they did ship this 18.1. If you're in, you know you can change over. It'll actually give you a thing saying do you want to be on the 18.1 beta? Instead it's developer beta only for now Unclear whether they will flip that over to the public beta or not. And then you have to actually ask to join Apple Intelligence and are added to the waitlist, although Apple says right now that it'll just take a matter of hours. But it makes you wonder if they have built in a waitlist system in order to protect themselves in case they're overwhelmed with requests on their cloud services stuff, so that they can gate that a little bit.

0:06:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Mac Rumors had a really good. I love Mac Rumors because they had two articles side by side. Here are all the Apple intelligence features in 18.1. And the next article. Here are all the Apple intelligence features that are not in 18.1. And the stuff that's left, that's out no image playground, no Genmoji, the image wand, the things that inserts images into notes prior to prioritizing notifications based on what they know about you, mail categories, all the stuff about photos, enhanced slow-mo chat. Gpt is not there. Uh, additional languages beyond us. English is not there, and this says here additional platforms. I'm quoting them. As apple said in its wwdc coverage of apple intelligence, the apple intelligence feature set will eventually expand to additional platforms.

0:07:20 - Alex Lindsay
No, not additional platforms as yet yeah, it's, it's funny they're they, leo, I mean, my assumption is your assumption, which is 18.0 will happen in maybe September and then this will follow in maybe October. I wouldn't put it past them to change the setup a little bit, and maybe I wonder if what they're trying to do is get an 18.0, that's sort of standard. Look, let's face it, apple intelligence is the most important thing in this entire cycle. I wonder if they're trying to prep a really simple 18.0 that can also be for the entire world, because the entire world is not going to get apple intelligence right. Europe's not going to get it and it's and it's, uh limited to us english. I wonder if they might try to put that out, actually even sooner, even if it's just early September or late August, and then try to get that 18.1 out the door as quickly thereafter so that they can get that on new iPhones as quickly as they can, because, remember, they've got to start loading software on the iPhone, even though they can update it through the box using their magic little tool that they have that we've talked about. You want to build a 18.0 on the new iphones as you're building them at the factory, before they go out the door. So I I wonder if the goal here really is to get a, a usable 18.0 done, while all the apple intelligence stuff, kind of uh, gets baked in for the for the next step.

But yeah, right now, as of yesterday, if you get the developer beta, you get writing tools. As of yesterday, if you get the developer beta, you get writing tools. You get a bunch of Siri stuff the more resilient Siri, where if you make a mistake and correct yourself, it understands it. It's got conversational context. It's got the contents of the Apple product database, which means if you ask it how to do something on your device, it will be able to generate a response based on Apple's own documentation.

Um, it's got the new interface. Uh, it's got some voice updates and then they added in apps like mail, gets their priority messages and their summaries and their smart replies, photos, gets the natural language search and the memory movie via text. But it doesn't get that background erased, like that's still hanging out there, that new focus mode that uses machine learning to break through things that are relevant and not anything else. That's in there, along with the summary summaries and messages, summaries for transcriptions out of notes and the phone app that you've made recordings of all that stuff is in there, so there's a pretty sizable number of things that are in there.

0:09:48 - Jason Snell
And I think that I fully expect all the features that Apple announced to be absolutely done by the end of next May, because they don't want to go to the next WWDC with anything hanging over it. But I think that we'll see a trickle of this. I think that Jason's right, we'll see a couple of things that will drive phone sales but may not be. But I think the more complete features. I would expect them, march through May of next year, to be slowly finishing off all the last little bits of things that they had promised to make sure that they don't go to WWDC without some version of at least a minimum viable product of each one of those released, and then they can talk about where they're going from there.

0:10:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, when you think about it, this is going to be one of the most confusing updates Apple's ever done, because they're shipping iOS 18. It's not going to have all the features that they promised and that got a lot of press. Even when they do ship it with all those extra features, not everybody is going to have hardware that can run it, and even if you have hardware that can run it, there might be added expenses or added quirks to make sure you can actually do it. It seems as though the era of one OS for just about everybody is coming to an end.

0:11:01 - Leo Laporte
So, Jason, you have the developer I 18 one are you got it installed yesterday?

yeah, yeah, I mean there are a couple of reasons why it would make sense that Apple might want to slow roll the intelligence. They've watched as Google and and open AI and Microsoft have rushed these things out to their sometimes detriment, and Apple, I'm sure, really wants to be safe. They don't want any egg on their face. So I think this makes sense. In other words, the product I would say is probably ready or close to ready, but Apple is rolling it out now to try it on you guys for safety. See what you can do to mess it up. And then of's, the issue of bandwidths and use and and and so forth I think it's a both.

0:11:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's both right. They started this project so late that I'm sure there's stuff that's just not ready. But also I do think that the stuff that is ready, you can see it. They put it out now in a developer beta and the message is really clear, which is this is beta, this is early, please don't be mean to us, please don't judge us too harshly. Right, we're working on it. This is our first step here and with the message of, like you have to sign up, and the fact that it's a developer beta, they're trying to really limit the scope, limit the number of users, see how it goes, see how people respond and then, kind of like, gradually open it up over time. So I do think they're being careful because, you're right, there are a lot of landmines out there and when you're under the cloak of a beta, right, you can say, look, we said it's beta, we said it's developer beta. Even, how many caveats do we need on this thing? It's not final.

I think that that all protects them, but there's also a whole bunch of stuff that I think is just not there and that they're not. You know, they're not ready to show to the the masses yet, because it's just too early. And that's okay, because they will. Yeah, there's not just 18-1 and 18-0, there will be 18-2 in late fall and in 18-3 and February probably, and like an 18.4 in April and an 18.5 right before WWDC next year, I mean, and I think all of them will probably have substantial new features. So it really is the final. They've been, like Andy said, they've been pointing this way for a while, but we really are in the sort of like iOS 18 means the whole year, not a thing that happens in September, and then we wait a year.

0:13:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I think you're going to see a line between they'll probably put out the stuff that can run locally on device quickest and the stuff that they need to push to their own servers is going to take longer, I'm imagining. I'd love to know like what stage are they at?

and just actually building the compute centers that they need, with all with all their custom silicon, because it was one thing when, when we were imagining that, well, maybe they'll just use, like Google Cloud to host all the stuff that they can't do on device, in which case everything's already built they just got to write the checks they have. I mean, they have to buy land for this. That's that's what these features are like checks they have, I mean, they have to buy land for this. That's that's what these features are like. So I I think we're going to see a division between the stuff that they can run locally and the stuff that's going to be powered by uh, by widgets from on high did they ask you, Jason, when you did the developer beta for intelligence?

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
did they say things like try to break it? Do they say things like try to break it? Do they say try to jailbreak it and things like that.

0:14:27 - Alex Lindsay
No, the impression I got was just I mean, they're not welcoming that, but they want they need to.

I think they want everybody to know, like, first off, the reason for developer beta, the official reason is they want developers, you know, who are very technical, to try it out and give feedback. And you know, implied in that is also sort it out and give feedback. And, you know, implied in that is also sort of advanced users in the press and all of that. I think it's very much. We want you to see it, we want you to give us feedback, but also please understand that it's a work in progress and that is why we want feedback, they say, and that is also, you know, shields them a little bit from things that don't quite work right, although I mean, I tried some of it this morning, some of the writing tools stuff.

I mean writing is very near and dear to me and I gotta say I've been, I've been using grammarly to do some checks, especially since I don't have a copy editor on retainer and I, you know the web, it's quick turn around and, um, it was similar to that, like it's the same thing where writing my blog posts in Markdown in a particular style, a lot of grammar and style checkers get a little confused. But it also found stuff that was good that I would have accepted, and so you know it's a mixed bag, but like that's a great feature to be able to have a really legitimate ML-based copy edit pass. That's just baked into every device, for example. That's a really nice feature and it just worked in TextEdit on the Mac. It's going to be everywhere where there are standard text controls when you bring up writing tools. That's pretty cool?

0:15:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, 100%.

There's so many of these text manipulation features that are. They're like the cut, copy and paste of the Macintosh back in the 80s where, yeah, you can't do something as complicated as the Mac, but just the idea of having these three basic features that are so easy to implement will immediately create benefits for everybody. So, as you say, the ability to say here is a bunch of text, please summarize it for me, or could you spot like any editing problems in here? I want this to be shorter, or I want the tone to be more formal, or what I've been using. So the thing. I really think that it like if you had a pie graph of how long it takes me to write like a thousand word thing 20 of it is writing, 80 of it is trying to figure out what the with the title should be. And the ability to say just give me like five titles for this and even if I don't use any of them, I'll say, okay, that one's closer to what I want and it's done, done and that's what I use the chat room for.

0:16:52 - Leo Laporte
By the way, the chat room is really good for that.

0:16:55 - Jason Snell
I guess I have my own little uh, real, real intelligence and again, I don't think apple's in any rush, I don't think they need, to be sure, I think they've got a pretty. You know they, um, they have a history, a long history of starting late, moving slow and then just slowly plowing through. But do they have a plan for avoiding the egg on their face that Google and Google? Well, I think that they've kind of protected themselves a little bit. We'll see what the on-device and their own cloud is going to. I think is going to keep on growing and I think it's going to be much more controlled than the other. And then they have a release valve, which is all the other stuff the chat, gpt to start with, but potentially Gemini and many other ones and so they have this little release valve of like, there's all this crazy stuff out there and you can still use that.

We're not saying you can't use it on an apple device, but we're going to keep on building things that are a lot on your device and a lot on, and I think that eventually, probably years from now, apple they're the on device and their private cloud will probably be what 90 of 90, 90 of the people want to use 90 of the time, and everyone's going to feel like, and they're all inside of that little protected enclave and it's all much more stable, and then you can always go out into the outside of the garden to go grab things that are more volatile, and so I think that it's the kind of solution only Apple can do, and that's what they like to do is do things that would be very hard for somebody else to execute, and that's what I think that they're kind of grinding towards, and I think it's a pretty useful solution, but it'll take a lot of work and effort and money to get caught up, and that creates a moat for them yeah, do they say.

0:18:32 - Leo Laporte
Do we know, is this their llm? It's not anybody else's their model yeah, okay, they.

0:18:38 - Andy Ihnatko
They published a. They published a tech paper on monday. Uh, alongside 8.1, that that really goes gets. Gets into more of the details on here's how we built it. Here's how we trained it. Here's what the all from technical stuff that you need to know a lot of math to understand to just simple things like here's what we got the data from. Here are the languages that our coding model can deal with. Here's how we tested it and so, yeah, this is absolutely their 100, their own work they say they took the responsible approach as opposed to everybody else.

Uh, and, by the way, we really are learning how our goal is to ensure our goal is to assure these model capabilities are aligned with Apple's core values and including our commitment to protecting user privacy and our responsible AI principles. Unquote.

0:19:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, okay, good, and do we do so from your limited time with it, Jason? Do you know when it's on device and when it's going out to the cloud? Can you does it announce that?

0:19:40 - Alex Lindsay
It doesn't announce it, you can't really tell, although you may be able to guess, but you don't really know. I saw somebody say that they were analyzing it and it looked like on the iPhone all the requests were going to the cloud and on the Mac all the requests were running locally. But I don't know if that is true and I don't know if that will remain true throughout the process. But it is one of the funny advantages that Apple has here is that they've got compute power on their devices. So somebody in the members discord was asking like what if this costs Apple a fortune in server? And Andy was mentioning real estate. Right, the advantage Apple has is a lot of this stuff they will be able to do on device and they won't need servers for it.

But there is the private cloud compute stuff. They are going to have to watch that. There are so many iPhone users that even if they gate this and put a waiting list on it like they are going to be riding a you know, bucking Bronco when this thing launches, they're going to have to manage it really closely. But it sounds like you know, early reports are that most of these things are just running on on the device on the device on the mac and the iphone. Maybe not, but we don't know. Yeah, nine to five.

0:20:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Mac has a piece that says that there's actually, uh, an apple intelligence report feature that you can access on the phone. Uh, that, uh, uh, mac has a new apple intelligence, for it made a menu within the privacy and security settings. By going there, users can export a report on their interactions with Apple Intelligence. So it says you can ask for, you can ask, you can specify the duration of the report. So please tell me, what kind of interactions did you? How did you process things for the past 15 minutes?

And there's even a warning underneath that saying that if you ask us, if you ask us for this report, then that might include personal data such as messages and text you enter in intelligent writing tools. So, yeah, I mean they remember that one of the big keystones that they were saying during the announcement was that not only X, y, z, double A, double B, double C, but also that we want to make sure that we're transparent, not only to researchers, who might want to see if we are making, if we are keeping our promises, but also to the users, which is one of the reasons why I think in a previous beta am I mistaken where there was just a screenshot that was shared saying that if you're using Apple intelligence, then it'll just simply process the request. If it's processed by OpenAI, you like a little warning saying hey, if you you want to send this to open ai, that means that we will be not responsible for the integrity of that data. Do you want to proceed?

0:22:12 - Leo Laporte
so, as long as you leave the user in control, that seems like they're doing an exceptional job one of the things other ai companies are coming up against uh is complaints that they are using content from sites without permission. I just saw a piece that said that anthropic uh, when it's blocked in robotstxt for their llm Claude, they won't they won't change the name of the crawler so they can get through. Uh. Reddit got 60 million dollars from Google for using its data, our data on Reddit, uh, and they are aggressively block uh everybody else all other search engines yeah, that's uh, it's yeah, uh.

So that we're getting in this kind of Wild West where people are are breaking the rules and and uh, content companies are responding by saying uh-uh. In the Apple white paper they say specifically we go to lengths to identify and license a limited amount of high quality data from publishers. Apple's been accused, by the way, of using that big data set that had transcripts from YouTube, you know channels and so forth. So this is their response. The licensed data sets provide a natural source of diverse and high quality long, long-context text, so we include them as part of the data mixture for the continued and context-lengthening stages of pre-training. I love this line. We decontaminate sections of publisher-licensed data the same way we decontaminate web pages. The implication is they're not using unlicensed stuff, but they don't come out and say that.

0:23:46 - Alex Lindsay
No, no. I mean, I think it's clear they are using unlicensed stuff and licensed stuff and I find that amazing, right, because they're saying, oh, we think licensing is important, but also we didn't do it, which is, I think, they did it out of desperation. But I'll say, my job is to create content on the Internet and Apple didn't come to me and negotiate with me for my content, but apparently they used it. So I don't know what that's about.

0:24:12 - Leo Laporte
Does that make you salty? I mean, is that upsetting?

0:24:16 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean they asked for forgiveness instead of permission. They disclosed their new Apple bot, extended after the fact, after they'd already done all the work, and said, oh, you can block this if you want to, and it's like okay, guys, right, like yeah, but you didn't tell us you were doing it, and the fact that they're licensing some kind of I. I think in the long run, they would like to build a model based on licensed content and they just just haven't been able to do it, whether that's time or that it's just not expedient. I do think that that has been a hedge, like making all those deals for high quality content. If it turns out that some court says you can't just rip things off the web and build a model on them. Apple has this thing in their pocket, which is they've got a license to use the New York Times and a whole bunch of other content sources that are legally licensed.

0:25:06 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a section here on data and says we respect the right of web pages to opt out of being crawled by Applebot using standard, robust text directives. So hopefully that means that they're not going to do the same kind of shenanigans and explicitly saying there's no private Apple user data included in the data mixture and then also saying that, yeah, we are getting data from public sources and also licensed sources, but that they're also making efforts to exclude profanity, unsafe material and personally identifiable information from that publicly available data.

0:25:38 - Leo Laporte
So it's a fine balancing act, isn't it? For Apple, this in some ways runs contrary to their long-standing, you know belief in privacy and, uh, at least their marketing.

0:25:53 - Andy Ihnatko
But that's a but, that's a good thing. Like you know they. How many times have your have any of us been in that position where it's like, oh, I really want to like this company is saying, no, no, please, please, please, we, it would cost more money to ship it back to us. Please keep that really nice laptop you really like and you reviewed. I'm like I made a big, big honking deal out of. It's not ethical to take freebies from companies that I write about.

Damn it, I gotta hold myself by my own standards and it's good that Apple is holding themselves up to their own standards.

0:26:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it's challenging. I think, uh, you know, people at the same time as they say I don't want you to crawl my stuff are also saying Siri is such a dope. Uh, you know, and there's a kind of there's a little bit of a trade-off. John Gerard in our Club Twitter Discord, uh has been playing with the new Siri. He said I asked Siri last night to show me on Apple TV plus some comedy movies. It worked. And then asked Siri to play X movie on my TV done. And then asked Siri to FaceTime my sister done. But he also tried to have Siri uh play the movie over share play with his sister and it couldn't do that. So some improvement, he says. I think it's really good now, at least a thousand percent better than the old Siri. Has that been your experience?

0:27:05 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you've just had it for a day Jason, yeah, it's too early to tell for me I it seems better, but that's all I can really say. A thousand percent it's a lot of percent I.

0:27:13 - Jason Snell
I had siri, um set a time for me yesterday and it worked perfectly, primarily what I used for last night. I did ask it. I asked it when is the sunrise tomorrow? And it was. It answered the, the, the issue. What all I'm pointing out is that a lot of times people have expectations that are way higher than what the, the, the system is designed for, and um, I find that I mean, we use Siri every single day, you know, in the, in the kitchen, for lots of things timers and questions and basic things and playing music, and um. I think that I think a lot of times people have unrealistic expectations of what it should do, and I think that we've been pretty happy with what it does do and it'll be interesting to see it get better. But I guess I just don't. I'm always like I don't. It never shows up like series of failure to me, because I've just figured out what it's good at and I just do those things that it's good at.

0:28:08 - Leo Laporte
But I have a tendency to be a little practical that way. Yeah, stability-wise, Jason, is it worth taking the chance to try this developer version?

0:28:14 - Alex Lindsay
I would say it feels just as stable as the 18.0 thread does, Because really all they're doing is taking Right they're just adding a layer Adding Apple. Intelligence features on top of it. It's been a pretty easy beta so far. Is taking right?

0:28:24 - Leo Laporte
they're just adding us adding apple intelligence features on top of icing on the it's been a pretty easy beta so far.

0:28:28 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't put it on any of my primary devices, but I haven't had any catastrophes I'm using it on my phone and I will say that you know I found there.

0:28:35 - Jason Snell
There's a funny thing in news right now that some articles, specifically the wall street journals, for some reason you click on it and that means close without warning. It doesn't, there's no warning, there's nothing, just disappears and you're like and it's the same article, it'll be the same art. Like there was an article yesterday or whatever, and I just kept on going back to it all day and going I wonder if it's a crash it, and I just I hit it and it's gone. You know like I was like wow, there's some, so there's some little. You know there are definitely bugs and it was repeatable. I just don't even know on a phone how to report that, like from where I'm at you shake it really really, really hard.

Yeah, exactly Right, and swear at it. Do they still do that?

0:29:10 - Leo Laporte
No, they used to be. You shake it really hard, do they really? Hard to get your feedback. They used to be I don't know.

0:29:15 - Jason Snell
Usually that's undo if you shake it.

0:29:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but.

0:29:18 - Jason Snell
I haven't tried it.

0:29:31 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that feedback app. So I, you know, I've had a little few little weird things. I don't even know if it's 18 on my iphone. I'm using it on my. My phone seems to work all right. Uh, every once in a while I'm dictating, the word will repeat. I think they fixed that. Um, yeah, otherwise it seems fine. I haven't lost calls anyway, not that I care to me, to be perfectly frank. Uh, right, so you know, maybe you should, maybe you should try it. This is for iOS 18 and iPad OS 18. Is that correct?

0:29:53 - Alex Lindsay
yes, and and macro Sequoia well, sequoia also has it.

0:29:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, yeah, oh, okay, all right. There is an update to Sonoma 17.6 that I'm excited about. I can now use three monitors on my lap, my mac m3 laptop. They've added a dual monitor support. Who knew they could do that? It's kind of magical somebody that was a hardware thing yeah, and then we talked about that, didn't we? You said, there's somebody at apple who, uh, who has this? That didn't we? You said there's somebody at apple who, uh, who has this?

0:30:29 - Jason Snell
yeah if I finally convinced them to put it in the update.

0:30:30 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little yeah yeah, let's take a little break.

We'll come back with lots more from our lovely team and a thanks, special thanks, to John Ashley, who is manfully struggling, uh, with the new system and doing a great job. John, it's fantastic. I appreciate it, thank you. This is this is our little shakedown cruise, little training here on the system that will be part of Mac Break Weekly going forward in two weeks. Our show today, brought to you by- now we're going to try something. Let's see what happens here. Brought to you by ZocDoc. Yay, it worked.

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Apple did say we should mention that they are going to voluntarily adopt the ai safeguards that the Biden administration has proposed. I guess you have the choice. The administration announced on Friday that apple is joining OpenAI, amazon, alphabet, meta and Microsoft, saying they will test their AI systems for any discriminatory tendencies, security flaws or national security risks. In the white paper there's a whole section on red teaming, which feels like something. Apple hasn't in the past really been a big focus group slash red teamer, but this time they're taking it pretty seriously.

0:34:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it's kind of basic stuff, it's all as you said. It's all voluntary, as you said. They agree to do red teaming before they release and share the data with other researchers, treat unreleased model weights confidentially as they're working on them, work in secure environments and uh participate or help develop a content labeling system so that generative AI like videos and pictures are going to be labeled and identified. Um, the, the administration themselves say this is just a start, but better than nothing they need Congress.

0:34:45 - Leo Laporte
If it's, if they're going to really have regulation with teeth, they're going to need Congress to pass along. Congress is busy. They just uh, the just Senate just passed kosa and Kappa. They're busy, uh, doing the people's work, I guess. Um, so there isn't a whole lot of Russian Congress to regulate AI. The White House guidelines are not enforceable. The only teeth they have is they say uh, if you don't submit to this testing, you will not be eligible to be purchased by the federal government. They do control that, yeah. So, um, yeah, I mean, I'm mixed feeling.

0:35:18 - Alex Lindsay
I don't yeah is that it in that incumbents, you know, have the advantage here because they've already been building this stuff and so they've got an advantage over startups that might do something new.

And so that's why a lot of the larger companies are like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we like it, we like it, let's all pledge to this. And then they're like we've got a moat, and AI may not have a lot of natural moats and maybe the regulation will do it, but Apple, you know, I feel like Apple wants to play ball, wants to say we're doing it right. And when they have these moments like training on data that everybody else is training on but feels a little creepy or a little bad to, you know, internet creators, I just get the distinct impression that they'd rather not do it. But there are lines that they're crossing because, like you said, they have. I just get the distinct impression that they'd rather not do it, but there are lines that they're crossing because, like you said, they have to thread a needle here. So having them say, sure, safe AI, we're for that is that fits with Apple. Sure, why wouldn't they?

0:36:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Also be super suspicious if they didn't. And the only reason they held off this long was because when this was first I think it was back in October when the first gang joined and, of course, all the people you've heard of companies heard of joined it Apple couldn't announce it because they couldn't admit that they were working on Apple intelligence at that point. But this is the right point to do it and like.

I said, if they had, there was no reason for them not to not to participate, and if they didn't, we were going to do AI, we would probably agree to this.

0:36:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. They didn't. They had announced. Um, they didn't. According to the research paper Sounds like you read it, Andy they did not mention Nvidia. They said they trained on Google's yeah, Tensor chips.

0:36:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, uh, they said they. I don't have the section in front of me, but they did specify the TPS they're using and, yeah, they, they, they. The fact that they mentioned Google's chips but did not mention Nvidia, it shouldn't necessarily mean that they are excluding Nvidia, but maybe at this stage, given that it's early stages, we know that they're they're buying a lot of compute power from uh, from Google, for training these models and maybe at this point they're going to go with what they know and go with what they've been working with. So, but there's nothing in the paper that's indicates that they couldn't use the NVIDIA platforms if they didn't want to. If they wanted to, yeah, yeah, but they did. They do seem to be very, very married to Google at this stage.

0:37:37 - Jason Snell
That's interesting it used to be frenemies or worse, google is writing them checks for 20 billion dollars. Right, that's true. Do is write them checks for $20 billion. Right, that's true. The least you could do is write them some checks back. It's a nice friend.

0:37:49 - Andy Ihnatko
But they are still definitive. Their cloud business is doing extremely well. They had their earnings call last week and it's doing extremely well. They're getting a lot of business, but they're still really definitely number three behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of cloud compute, and Microsoft definitely has the ability to give them kind of what they want. I think it's kind of interesting. I think it's a cultural thing.

0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
This is that time of the year, the quarterly reports. Apple's will be this week. Jason's firing up the colored ink printer.

0:38:25 - Alex Lindsay
The spreadsheet and charts again. Yes, yes, hey, shlomo, build me charts.

0:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Hey, well, you know, I'm surprised you haven't automated that.

0:38:35 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I've automated a lot of it, so yeah.

0:38:39 - Jason Snell
You're not drawing those squares by hand, you're not.

0:38:42 - Alex Lindsay
I have a script that rips the numbers out of the pdf and then I just paste it into numbers and then I have a script that generates the the actual image files from did you write? That yourself yes, I did in python or excel, or oh don't. Are you gonna make me say it, it's php I think it's an Apple script.

0:39:05 - Leo Laporte
That's all right. No, I I respect somebody who can use Apple script.

0:39:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I love that. I love the fact that at every level, the tool development is exactly the same. I don't know what this was built so long ago and maintain, but for so long that I no longer really know what technology is under this. We we only know that it works and we don't want to poke the bear.

0:39:24 - Alex Lindsay
I actually I created a version of it in because I was on a trip when a few years ago, when the I think it was five years ago, six years ago when the results came out and I didn't. That was in my period where I was really trying not to travel with a laptop. The laptops weren't very good, oh no, and the iPads were great, and I rebuilt my whole workflow in shortcuts and it does work. I just am usually sitting at my desk on my Mac and the Apple script script is faster and it already works. So I use that. And I think the one that parses the PDF is a shortcut where it's actually like taking Apple's results PDF, turning it into text, detecting which ones are the numbers I need, which is super brute force, like take line 18, 20, 21, 22, and 25, and then put it on the clipboard and then you paste it in. So it's yeah, every little bit I mean I do that, what?

0:40:17 - Jason Snell
Four times a year. It seems like it's worth doing it.

0:40:22 - Alex Lindsay
So, yeah, we'll see what they say. Right, It'll be. This is going to be one of their quieter quarters, but there's always some detail about how iPhone sales are going or how services are growing or how new Mac sales or the iPads that came out. Does the iPad get a boost here and how do people feel about that?

0:40:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That's, in some ways, it's more about those clues about how the different products are doing than anything else I'm really curious to see how they address china, because that's been the top of the financial news for apple for the past six months that they are just going down, down, down. Uh, huawei is going back up, up, up. They're recovering from all the problems that uh, that the, the, the trade war has had against them and their inability to get access to the chips they want and the manufacturing that they want. And every time you see again, that's like every second or third one is either some sort of antitrust thing or, yeah, it turns out that Apple is now like the number four, number five, number six phone in China. Huawei had like a 22 or 23, 23 increase, a quarter for europe year over year, and apple has not been doing stuff like that. So that's kind of what I'm looking, looking for and and it's always fun, as I, as I always say the fun part of this is that, um, we get this.

This is the second kind of venue in which we get to hear like sort of a state of the union. The first is, of course, wwdc, but the other is every quarter, where they have to give these earnings results. But they also want to tell investors and analysts. Here's what we're about. Here's what our focus is. Here's what's driving our success right now, here's what we think is going to drive it in the future, and there's a Q&A for which I don't think that they get the questions beforehand.

And if they are not just, it's not just, they can't lie. If they are misleading in any way, if they omit something that investors think that they should have, they get tagged hard by the SEC and investors. I think that a few months was it last year that Tim Cook got tagged by investors for $500 million because they thought that you were asked directly about China, like last year, the year before, and you said that everything's going fine, even though you kind of knew that everything wasn't going fine. We're gonna you're gonna have to pay for that. So that's why it's kind of interesting you hear people have to these. You never hear a place where these C-level executives are in a potentially in a place to sweat, and this is where it happens?

0:42:45 - Jason Snell
Are the questions wide open to the shareholders, or is it because some companies have a couple analysts that ask all the questions?

0:42:52 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, so that's what this is. There's a usual suspects of analysts. They are financial industry analysts. Tech journalists are not on the call, shareholders aren't on the call, and Andy's right. They don't know what the questions they are and they're. They're not given to them, but they can anticipate it based on what the question it's like preparing for a debate. Well, the thing is they choose the people and the people know that if they ask something, probably too far out there they won't really get invited back.

That doesn't stop them. One of my favorite things about those calls because they can be a little dry, you know it's financial call is that moment where there's something that happens and it's like so, Tim, any color about what the new iPhone is going to be, Tell me now. And they're like what are you?

Are you high? No, but they try, they do try. I don't want to know about a future product, tim, I just want to know, you know, if an iPhone were to be released in the fall, what would it be like? Right, and it's like no, don't do that. What are you trying? But they do. Sometimes their questions are good. A lot of them are pretty standard. Over the last few years, apple has anticipated them to the point where now I think they mostly have scripted answers and it's not as clear as it used to be.

0:44:02 - Jason Snell
And it's not video. Is it just audio? Just audio. Yeah, what you don't see on the other end I haven't seen Apple's, but I've worked on other quarterlies that some of them are video, some of them are not. With some companies it is an array of monitors that are out in front of them. That is, you know, because there's a whole staff there that is constantly pulling up the, the, the. You know the salient points and the. You know the, the math and everything else. So it's not just you think that they're just sitting there on the phone at a conference room staring at it and answering off the top of their head. There is a, there's a staff of 20 30 people on the back end that are pushing data to the, to the c-suite, to answer those questions with the data that they have yeah, it's very's very clear.

0:44:43 - Alex Lindsay
They've got, I mean, a lot of the questions. The answers end up being restatements of things that have come before. However, it's like mining, you know it's panning for gold. If you ask the right question, you may get them to give you a tidbit that they didn't give you in their preparing remarks. But it used to be.

You know, back in the day when Tim Cook was on these calls and Steve Jobs would rarely appear right, there was that period in there where it was sort of like, oh, steve's here, ooh, that back in that period they'd make a statement and it would be like five minutes and then there would be 55 because it's an hour 55 minutes of questions and there'd be a lot more kind of back and forth and there'd be they would dig out the color from that. That was the whole thing. They asked for more color all the time. And these days the statement goes on for like 25 minutes and the questions are not. You know they don't. They're much more disciplined. I mean to give them credit. They're real disciplined about what they say. It was kind of more fun before, but I understand from a corporate perspective why you wouldn't want to. You know, have somebody say something that they would live to regret later, if you can avoid it when every word can cost you a hundred million dollars.

0:45:48 - Leo Laporte
Right, you know, like you know you're like we're gonna use less words hey, tim, I just got the new galaxy z flip 6 and I wasn't sure if I should open the box. Is there anything, any reason you could think of that? I might not want to open this folding phone, tim right now tim, a new iphone, says what?

0:46:07 - Alex Lindsay
what again, just trying to trick them, just trying to trick them. Ah, you know, I had to do it, you know I had to do it, Jason Snell.

0:46:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Why do we even let you in here?

0:46:15 - Leo Laporte
according to the market analysts, the the. The big thing everybody will be watching is china sales. Canalis says that apple has really been declining in china. The top six smartphone manufacturers are vivo, oppo, honor, huawei and xiaomi, followed by apple in sixth place, and apple's market share is 14, according to canalis. Again, this is canalis. I don't know how accurate it is, but a decrease of two percent from the second quarter of the previous year.

0:46:45 - Alex Lindsay
So apple is declining and so that's one of the things those analysts will absolutely be asking last quarter canalis had had bad numbers in china for apple and apple, said they remember he denied it. They were wrong and that that was not what they were seeing, and so you know that's. That's the challenge with chinese. Market is first off. China is kind of hard to read, and then the analysts are trying everything they can. At least apple has actual sales figures to report. Yeah, they know.

0:47:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they may not want to know what Vivo, oppo, honor, huawei, xiaomi are doing Bingo, bango, bongo and Irving yeah. Zippo Harpo, by the way those are all Chinese manufacturers, and they really are dominant.

0:47:26 - Alex Lindsay
No, I mean, it's amazing that Apple plays as well as it does in China because it is an outsider company and that's because Tim Cook has made such an effort to make Apple and Apple's brand part of the Chinese culture of smartphones. And they have, and it ebbs and flows right. I mean, if the government is feeling a little more nationalistic, they're going to kind of put the screws to Apple. And if the government is feeling like it's to their benefit for Apple to to bloom a little bit and that people like the fact that a worldwide recognized brand is also available to them in China, they'll let it flower a little bit. Not to not to say that parts of the Chinese market are entirely artificial and controlled by the government.

0:48:09 - Jason Snell
Well, and I don't think, I don't think the government is necessarily, I mean, I don't think that they are obtuse enough to not see that Apple's diversifying manufacturing as well, which is going to create internal headwinds in China, you know from the government you know is that you know Apple has headwinds.

0:48:25 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, you could be on the call with talk like that. Yeah, exactly.

0:48:31 - Jason Snell
But but you know, know, those headwinds, you know show up because, uh, you know china's gonna push back on apple because you know they're gonna make it a little harder and that's their way of applying pressure. Um, but apple, it has to diversify, because if there's a conflict between, if there ends up being a conflict between, china and taiwan, um then you know, all these companies have to know where they're going to go next, because they're not going to be able to go to China.

0:48:53 - Andy Ihnatko
And it is clear that they've been sending the message for the past five years that they would love it if all of the technology that everyone relies on is Chinese technology. It would be wonderful if all the money that's spent on that the middle class spends on gadgets and luxuries are Chinese manufactured, the money stays inside the country. And luxuries are chinese manufactured, the money stays inside the country, and it's not not that god. I don't think we've been doing this podcast long enough to have conversations about the death of of of apple in any way, shape or form. But these are the times when, when you look at numbers like these, where they do seem to be not in just oh god, they just had a few bad quarters where they do seem to be in a period of decline in China.

That's when you look at other analysts and say how much of Apple's money comes from the iPhone? Oh, it's typically 50%. It's half of their money is still coming from iPhone sales. So until they get that part of the pie down to like, until they replace that income with something else, they are really going to have to be pursuing china hard. They're really going to be pursuing india hard. Any place that they haven't, uh, any place. They haven't sold iphones before. They're going to try hard to make sure that they're selling iphones there because they are getting. They're getting a lot of android switches, but they're not really winning the hearts, and the next generation of iPhone owners is not going to come from people who are switching from Android, that's absolutely for sure. So they have to keep this pipeline open and flooding Watch with interest when they ask about India.

0:50:26 - Leo Laporte
Apple cut the prices of iPhones in India after India cut its tariffs to Apple. Smartphone duties were cut from 15 were cut from 20 to 15. Apples reduce the prices of its pro models by three to four percent. Whether that'll make a difference in India I don't know, but if certainly it's, as the second largest economy uh in the world, is something Apple could use to shore up its losses in China it's a small percentage, but I mean generally.

0:50:57 - Jason Snell
Still, when you go overseas, the iPhone is often seen as a prestige.

0:51:01 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, advice that you have as a it's priced prestige, like the phone version of driving mostly, yeah, so yeah, yeah, exactly yeah, I've been reading that I think I mentioned this last week, but that, uh, economists are saying that, like the middle class in india is going through the same sort of thing that they went through in china, like 10 or 15 years ago, that there's a lot, it's a greater middle class with more money to spend on luxury items and things that just make them happy, and that's why india is such a opportunity they don't like. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, if Apple really wanted to become a significant factor in the Indian market, they would have had to really manufacture almost a localized version of it to deal with the deal with how much money people tend to spend on those phones and the features that those phones need to have, and now not so much. So this is why that the opportunity is probably greater maybe in india than it is in china apple also plans to start assembling the pro models of its iphone in india this year.

0:52:03 - Leo Laporte
Google's doing the same, so, and that's also to reduce the tariffs, because if you're making it there, I guess you're not importing it. Um apple, uh revenue in india jumped 42 percent in 2023.

0:52:21 - Jason Snell
So there is some up, there is some upside. There's some remember that india is now the largest country in the world, I mean population wise, the most populated country in the world so it's yeah, it's one and a half billion, right, yeah? It's past china.

0:52:30 - Leo Laporte
It's a good market. Uh, apple has reached a deal. I don't know if they'll bring this up at the analyst call, but apple has reached a deal, uh, with a union. It's first ever with the store employees in maryland. Is that the tassin center?

yes or the international associate association of machinists and Aerospace Workers. Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, the I-A-M-A-W-C-O-R-E, which represents employees at a retail location in Maryland, last announced it has struck a three-year deal with Apple that will increase pay by an average of 10% and offer other benefits to workers 85 employees at the Towson Apple store. Now they have to vote it in, so the vote's scheduled for August 6th, but the bar I guess they do the bargaining and then they vote yeah, they voted last year like something like 64, 65 to 85 to uh to unionize that in according to law.

0:53:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That then starts a bar, a negotiation period in which they draw up a contract with apple, after which either the whole thing collapses and the government has to step in or things go to it. Things go to a worse projection. However, they it's actually their sec that it's going to be the first apple store to actually be unionized. They were the second to vote to unionize behind an oklahoma city store, but those negotiations are still ongoing. Um, I think the the maryland store was actually complaining, or the union negotiators were complaining that apple was kind of dragging their feet there. So it's good to see that it actually actually comes through yeah, it didn't go easy.

0:54:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean it took so in fact the workers announced a strike in may because talks uh had gone on for more than a year. Yeah, with apple, and I guess it was the threat of a strike that brought apple back to the table and they were able to work out something. So you know. You know apple is has has made a deal, but it doesn't mean that they did it willingly.

0:54:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, this is every their, their typical company in which, like, of course, uh, there are also allegations that, yeah, you can't like pull employees out of their lunch break, the managers can't pull employees out of their lunch break to tell them about why unionizing would be bad. You can't like not allow these workers to like share materials, all this sort of stuff. Where there wasn't. There's like a website on the government that says that here are things you cannot do, and Apple was, or, excuse me, or at least that location that those things were happening.

Every company is going to fight this sort of thing tooth and nail. If they've never had to, if they've never had to deal with the unionized workforce, it is. They're not going to enjoy it. They're not going to be in favor of it. They're going to enjoy it. They're not going to be in favor of it. They're going to fight it every single way they can. So the fight, the, the fact that they finally, like, gave up the fight, that's, I think, a win. We'll see.

Well, and as usual, when something like this happens, when something that has never happened before is now a reality, now we get to see whether the world comes to an end or not, and if it doesn't, that becomes like well, why don't other stores unionize? Why doesn't? Why don't more Starbucks facilities unionize? And the bottom line is they wouldn't have unionized if they were very, very happy where they were, if they were happy with the policies, if they're happy with the way they were being treated. Uh, it's rarely something you do just because you enjoy having a level of bureaucracy in your life that you didn't have before.

0:55:46 - Leo Laporte
So that's why this% raise. I think that sounds like a good thing, I guess. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, andy Inako right there. He's on WGBH in Boston when Soon A week from Thursday, I think Okay. Also, Alex Lindsay, who every morning gets up early, does what I will be doing soon Walks, shuffles along in his jammies to the studio in the garage and a nice shirt doing the show smelling his shirt, seeing if that's okay for camera.

I can't wait, I'm really looking forward to it. One of the things we're going to be doing in the new studio, the new story, kind of lets us do because it's such a production to do a show here. You know we have to, engineers have to come in and we you know it's a lot of work uh, I can, I can literally just go up, because seven stairs uh to the, uh to the attic, and do a show. So I hope we'll. I want to do more ad hoc shows and I'm mentioning this now because I hope that you guys will be. You know, if there's, if there's a story, uh, that, uh, you know, I think one of you would apply to, or a couple of, we can do it. We don't have to wait till Tuesdays to do, uh, you know, a little ad hoc something. Yeah, so I want to do more. Yeah, I'm hoping to, and honestly, alex, you're the inspiration yes, would you, I'll page you.

We actually have two pagers that we're getting rid of. We found two pagers in the studio. So yeah, alex, you're the inspiration. I mean Office Hours. The way Office Hours works is great, and it really made me start thinking well, does Twitter have to be solely a maker of podcasts? Can we do other things too?

0:57:29 - Jason Snell
And I think that I have found over the last four years that it is just, it's not only freeing, but it is, you know, and you've gotten to, during over covid, so many more of us are coming in remotely than being there.

0:57:40 - Leo Laporte
It just made more and more sense to go virtual uh, and of course, Jason Snell, who works out of his garage or his mom's house.

0:57:49 - Alex Lindsay
You never know. Jams, jim, jams Yep exactly.

0:57:51 - Jason Snell
Jim jams.

0:57:52 - Leo Laporte
It's comfy that. But the real challenge for me is I, the reason we went. I started when I started doing the radio show in 2004,. I was doing it at home and I almost immediately found a space to rent because I just felt like it was kind of I just couldn't get my energy up. It was like too easy.

0:58:09 - Jason Snell
We'll see. For me, the big thing is that I have an office that I do office things in, and the rest of the house is actually pretty low tech. Other than the tv, there's almost no electronics in the rest of the house, you know, and so when I walk out of that, when I walk out of this room, it's like walking into another world, you know, like I don't, and so if I yeah, that's exactly that's what we've made my attic look like another other world.

0:58:31 - Leo Laporte
I don't, I don't take my?

0:58:32 - Jason Snell
I mean, I have my phone, but I don't take my ipads out of the office. I don't take my laptop out of the office. I I don't even take my, if you need a tech fix, you go there I walk into one.

0:58:41 - Andy Ihnatko
There's one room that is all tech, and then the rest of the rooms are I mean, there really is something to that like one of the reasons why I keep doing things from the library is that I just noticed that the fact that I have to pack my backpack take a lovely like mile and a half walk being in a place yeah, yeah, you get your mind gets into a different space, whereas like, especially especially the times when the show I'm on a really super deadline, like I've got a book deadline, like at the end of the week, it is like book, book, book, book, book, book, it is book, book, book.

It is 159. Okay, I will then switch to this chair podcast podcast, possibly positive. Then we're over. Okay, book, book, book, book, book. And I'm not sure if I was at my best during those sort of things. It's a I I'm enjoying. There really is something to resetting your head between tasks.

0:59:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Well, I uh, maybe I will find a way to do that. On the seven steps up sometimes that's all it takes.

0:59:30 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that's I. I I've been staring at my screen thinking about how am I going to write this thing and I literally go into this room yeah, and it comes out a little context, switch it is. It can actually be really nice to have that be your little you know, you know when it really is.

0:59:44 - Leo Laporte
It is a man cave. I've really turned it into it. I even have a oled tv and a couch up there. It is kind of my little man cave. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey. I want to thank Michael Rice because he sent us another Vision Pro jingle based on a song you might recognize from Quincy Jones. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the vision pro segment vision pro, vision pro.

1:00:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Please don't go. I hope quincy jones does not sue us for that. Can I put me up?

1:00:47 - Leo Laporte
I love it. Uh. So in the vision pro world, well, the number one story is uh week. Uh, this sunday it'll be a vision pro version of this week in Tech, thanks to Alex Lindsay and StreamVoodoo. Right, they're the ones doing the back end.

1:00:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and what you want to do is go to streamvoodoocom, slash spatial so that you can get on the list, because that's a mailing list and we'll send out the link there. We'll probably post it in a couple other places as well, but it'll be something that you can. The best thing to do is to get on their list so that you get a direct email that lets you know where to go.

1:01:11 - Leo Laporte
And it's an app. Their Spatial app is an app.

1:01:14 - Jason Snell
It's an app for the Vision Pro and you'll be able to see it there. What we're doing is we're streaming just from an iPhone, so it's an iPhone to the…. Oh, you're not bringing like the R8 and the dual lens I may bring it to record, but I'm not going to stream from it, so I'm going to record some stuff there but what we're streaming from.

There's another app on the iphone that streams in spatial. So when I pull it up I see two windows, which is left and right eye, and then I I send that out to um, to the, to the app, and so we'll, we'll be testing, we're testing it all week and I think it's stream photo it should be a lot of fun yeah now there's a lot of people who say, well, I have a meta quest, can I watch?

1:01:53 - Leo Laporte
can they not right now?

1:01:54 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's just. It's just, you know, and it has to do with just making sure that one thing's working well. I mean, there's enough moving parts. They're trying to support a bunch of other platforms, it. I don't think that it's impossible for that to happen, but I think that what we're doing is what I think that StreamBudu is doing. I don't have any part of it, I mean, other than playing with it. It's not my app, but I think that they're just trying to stay focused on to make sure it actually works well.

1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
If we made a recording, could it then be made available? Yep.

1:02:23 - Jason Snell
I think we could. Yeah, and it'll get recorded into the cloud as it happens, the cloud as it happens, and so we could theoretically take that MV, the MV AGVC, and then convert that to dual I and then put it in. So I think that it's possible that it could. The recording could end up in the in a MetaQuest, no commitments, but it's a conceivable.

1:02:44 - Leo Laporte
But we'll give it a shot. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate that that's not the only Vision Pro news, but it's a good way to start no, no, no, no, no no.

Please don't go. There is a rival you know Elon Musk's Neuralink company, and they're about to, by the way, do another. I don't want to say the word victim, but have another person get the implant. They're making progress. There are other companies doing this, including one called Synchron. Their implant now lets people control their Vision Pro with their minds. They announced today they've connected their brain implant to a Vision Pro headset. Synchron is trying to build a brain computer interface that will allow patients who are paralyzed to control their personal electronics with their minds. Imagine that.

1:03:37 - Jason Snell
So I guess it's, because I guess they're still have their eyes, but they're. I guess it's the tapping I guess that they're controlling. Is that you think about? Yeah I don't, I don't know yeah it's for people with limited physical mobility, so you'd be able to put the headset on, because the thing that I mean obviously it's following your eyes around and I think that that would be hard but clicking. If they can't click, it would just be thinking about it or thinking or doing something with that would uh yeah that's what synchro's saying.

1:04:03 - Andy Ihnatko
They're working to make it accessible to patients who can't speak or move their upper limbs yeah, yeah, and it's not like they're using the, uh, the Vision Pro, as a therapeutic device or as an assistive device in itself. It's just he could uh, like the, the, the, the beta tester they mentioned in the in the material, like, has ALS and he basically uses the Vision Pro the same way that they, through the implant that he uses his phone, his laptop, his ipad, all that other sort of stuff, um here's a new acronym for you to to learn bci, brain computer interfaces.

1:04:41 - Leo Laporte
That's what neuro neurotech is doing. That's what neural link elon musk's company is doing.

1:04:47 - Jason Snell
Um cnbc there's says there's actually quite a few companies in this field yeah, like I had a little problem with my bci, I had a headache bci. Yeah, it was like the bci, the bci was corrupted and it was like, oh, what a migraine, oh synchron is a little different because they insert the bci into the jugular vein.

1:05:07 - Leo Laporte
They don't do open brain surgery.

1:05:09 - Andy Ihnatko
That's neural link does yeah, it's a stent, like they described as a stent-like device and the that I. I want to learn more about it, but it's the. It's not just the the. One of the challenges of this kind of technology is not just getting it to work, but also making it so that making a device that can be removed, like the neural link, is a real. It's brain surgery and it's a fairly invasive process. If one of the connections fails, that's just it.

1:05:35 - Leo Laporte
The idea of a stent-like device that can be inserted and then removed, either for repair or for upgrades, that seems like a great way to go mark, the als patient who has been working with the trials, says he meets with Synchron for two hours twice a week to practice different skills and functions. He's been testing it since April. He's been able to use the Vision Pro to send texts, play Solitaire and watch TV. He said using his brain-computer interface to control the headset is not much different from using it to control his iPhone and computer. Some applications within the headset are more limiting and challenging, and the others he's still experimenting for new ways to use it. That is super, super cool. He says he can't lift his arms to paint anymore, so he's using the Vision Pro to create art.

1:06:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That is just amazing, just amazing and that's another reason why, like that should be part of the conversation with generative art. Like, what if you? What if you have an artistic vision but you don't have the ability to manipulate the tools for creating art, the ability to speak into a microphone or use a tool a a visualizer, like the Vision Pro, and still be an artist to the full extent of your imagination that's a pretty damn good application of generative art.

1:06:58 - Leo Laporte
Fashion continues to come to the Vision. Pro Balenciaga and German luggage brand Ramoa have launched apps for the VP that's how I like to call it. The VP launched apps for the VP that's how I I like to call it the VP. Uh, yeah to I guess. Uh, beyond, balenciaga's uh app is designed to provide users with an immersive view of the fashion shows and collections.

1:07:22 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just, you know, it's just a way of looking at it, I guess it's a wonderful opportunity for the scum of the earth and the riffraff to have part of the excitement of being at one of these events, even though we would never, ever ever let them within 100 yards, I'd like to call them the little people.

1:07:37 - Leo Laporte
Actually, uh. Ramoah's app lets you. Uh is an immersive and interactive experience. According to mac rumors, it allows users to explore the brand's iconic suitcases in detail. You ever want to get inside a suitcase?

1:07:50 - Andy Ihnatko
well, now you can the voyage from the from the vantage point of a luggage tag. Now you can see it, wow see it and be it.

1:07:58 - Leo Laporte
Gucci had a vision pro app released in april uh this is.

1:08:02 - Alex Lindsay
This is really. The gucci app is really great. I mean, is it it is? I have never bought a thing from gucci, nor will I ever, but it's a really, really interesting use of extended it's like video, but then they extend the video with other ar features. It's actually really it's worth. If people have a vision pro, you should get the gucci app just because it's free and it is a. It's almost like somebody saying here's what we think the future of of uh kind of video and immersive experiences is it's like it's worth the ride nice, it's interesting.

1:08:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I just I'm just with the vision pro, with the meta quest, with all these other things. It's disappointing when you have a device, a platform with so much potential and so much of the news is, hey, here's another app that will help you shop and it's a great demonstration. But it's like yeah, so I'm going to give you 800 or 3500 and, in of, in return, I will get something that will help people sell me your refrigerator for right then in my.

1:08:59 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's nice, but uh, you were talking in the discord Jason about the new horror experience on the uh.

1:09:09 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, lake Wrangler. Oh it's. You know those Swedish murder mystery shows? Yeah, it's kind of like this is where they would find your body, washed up on the shores of Lake Wrangler. Look, I think what Apple said is you know, different people find comfiness in different places. Maybe it's the beach at Bora Bora. Maybe it's the desert's clarity, bora. Maybe it's the desert clarity of the desert air in Joshua Tree. Maybe it's that beautiful lake that's below Mount Hood. But what if you wanted to be in a creepy Norwegian fog shrouded lake, that where?

there could be a killer around any corner's lake wrangler environment which they added actually the cool thing about this is that they showed first off the coming soons are gone now. Um, they've, they've, they've come. It was soon, uh. But also it shows the extensibility of apple uh, vision pro environments, where they're all dynamically downloadable and removable, and that means that they can. There was no software update. They just updated whatever you know environments available file they have on their server and suddenly Lake Wrangler became available to download and so there's another environment. Environments are great. I mean, I love them. I want more of them. I want developers to be able to contribute the ones they built for their apps to the system so you can work in them. It's one of my favorite things about Vision Pro, honestly, is these wacky environments that you can sit in and do your computing if you don't want to see the world around you. This one will not be one of my choices because I do feel like I have to keep looking around Like where's.

1:10:50 - Leo Laporte
So it's very. He's got a knife right like. I don't want to do that. You can't really. It is.

1:10:55 - Alex Lindsay
It's very sad or it's one of those sad, sad uh norwegian drama, crime dramas where it's like not only am I sad because I'm a divorced dad, who, who, who suffered, was recently shot and just recovered, and I, I'm a detective, but now also there's this horrible murder and I'm the only one who can solve it, and it happened here at Lake Wrangla. That's the vibe of this place.

1:11:19 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's fantastic, because how many of us can have enough vacation days, let alone the travel budget to travel to Sweden, to be murdered we?

1:11:27 - Leo Laporte
get to sort of experience.

1:11:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It's no longer for the European elite, it's no longer for the. For the European elite, it's now accessible to everybody, yeah, and we should be very, very proud to be living this time. You, too, can be in a Norwegian murder mystery.

1:11:36 - Jason Snell
It is something that I think that as you go forward I mean horror is one of the things that higher frame rate and more immersive, you know, like you can tell some horror experiences that aren't like games or anything interactive just a movie that is going to take you kind of a Blair Witch Project kind of approach to things in the not too distant future.

Again, one of the things that we hope is going to open up a lot of these opportunities is the new Blackmagic camera when it comes out, just because it's the first camera that's not an art project that does this, and so just being able to Does what Captures 8K, potentially captures 8K per eye, 90 frames a second. So you're going to, you know, at a high frame rate and really high resolution per eye and something you can just turn on and hit record. Even if it's going to be a $25,000 camera that rents for a thousand dollars a day or whatever, it's something that I think you're going to see more people use in a variety of different ways watching the uh gymnastics women's gymnastics team final on uh on peacock this morning.

1:12:49 - Leo Laporte
And you see, I mean you know, simone Biles is surrounded by camera operators, all you know, trying to get in, and there's the one Japanese guy on sticks Because I realized, oh, he's probably shooting 8K, right, he cannot move.

1:13:03 - Jason Snell
He has to stay right there.

1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
You know If only I could see it. I would like to see it in 8K.

1:13:11 - Alex Lindsay
Have the loons stopped calling clary's?

1:13:17 - Leo Laporte
oh, it's chilling. What movie would you watch in lake vrangla? What do you say?

1:13:21 - Alex Lindsay
oh, good, wow, yeah, anything creepy actually, no, just like a big broad, like palm springs or something, something's very bright and funny hello, dolly, uh, yeah because otherwise I'm out of there what was the elizabeth moss?

1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
uh, show that she's a murder. Uh, uh, she's a detective in australia killed something. Lake top of the lake.

1:13:43 - Alex Lindsay
That would be a good one to watch in lake vranga happy valley, which is a british show about a valley that is not happy. Not happy might be a good one to put in there. Unhappy, what is the one?

1:13:56 - Jason Snell
with the, the ai, uh, the woman who's ai, or she's partially built, or whatever. She's in that house in the middle of nowhere oh, I love that one. Yeah, yeah, that would be a good one.

1:14:05 - Alex Lindsay
That's a good one well, I mean, really what you want is like wallander with kenneth brana, right where it's like I'm just a depressed Swedish or whatever Scandinavian detective. That's what you want to watch on there.

1:14:16 - Leo Laporte
Just really depressing stuff. Depressing stuff with the loons in the background Sounds good. That's the Vision Pro segment. Hit it. You can use the other one this time.

1:14:29 - Alex Lindsay
Now you know we're done talking the Vision Pro. Yeah, yeah.

1:14:37 - Leo Laporte
You know the production values. We leave nothing on the table. We're going up, we're just putting it all in. I'm going to have I'm getting one of those stream decks that has knobs and buttons. I'm gonna have yeah, there you go, all sorts of we're morning here we come. Where'd you find that one, John Ashley? Oh my, that's when we had jingles wow, now play renee ritchie. Yeah, because I don't think there's a Jason Snell. I hate to say it oh yeah, production values.

I love it, Jason snow jace, let's do it together in harmony. Andy ready one, two, three in the morning hey, nbr. 68, san francisco the sports leader uh, I wish I had my old jingle package. I don't know where it went. It'd be fun. You know why do you let those things go? This is my fear here, as we move out of the studio, I know there's gonna be one thing. I'm gonna go. I shouldn't have let that go. That's life right. You move on things.

1:16:03 - Alex Lindsay
That's right things you move on or you become a hoarder. So don't yeah, I don't want to be I've.

1:16:08 - Leo Laporte
I've watched that show. I don't want to be that guy.

1:16:11 - Alex Lindsay
There is a Wrangler. See how you feel that.

1:16:24 - Andy Ihnatko
So apparently you can uh now get zoom doom, gz doom on uh the app store. Yeah, yeah, so GZ doom is like a not an emulate emulator of doom, it's actually a port of the source code, because the source code is out there and everywhere.

1:16:33 - Jason Snell
That's a way to do it.

1:16:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's available for a bunch of different platforms. And not only is it compatible with Doom, it's like the Infocom player, where it's compatible with any game that was built on top of the Doom engine. So it's not just Doom, but a whole bunch of other games and a whole bunch of other mods that were worked with, work with it and some. As usual, it's just one couple of people who decided to kind of get this running on ios and they finally got it running on ios yeah, so gen zd is like the infocomp player that you can then put games into, is that?

the idea right, it's a, it's a right, it's, it's a buck 99 for that yeah, and then you have launch your no saved configuration.

1:17:12 - Leo Laporte
Add a launch configuration. And then do I have to download ROMs or something to get Zoom on here?

1:17:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you do have to source Import files.

You have to find it somewhere magically, as though such a thing were possible, because we know that everyone's pretty honest out there. They don't put ROM files out there. Yes, but's nice. It's nice to have this just as a completest sort of thing to answer the question will it run doom when you have people who are trying to like towards doom to a ti calculator? It's like I will not be denied the ability to port doom to what it to, to the slide rule ah, so so the that version of doom is on github so you don't have to break a law.

1:17:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, to get it. Uh, it is on github, and then you somehow magically get it into your phone.

1:18:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's not. It's not as simple as just downloading doom from the app store or buying doing the app store, but again, that is part of the game, part of the challenge getting doom to run that as part of the game part of the challenge getting Doom to run on your iPhone.

1:18:14 - Leo Laporte
My God, they've had it running on the Apple Watch for years. I don't know what's the problem. They have it running on the taskbar, on the old MacBooks.

1:18:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the touch bar, sorry. Yeah, wow Again. If it has a display and there's some way of putting input into it, someone is porting doom to it.

1:18:37 - Leo Laporte
Apple watch, apple maps, rather, launch on the web will thank God.

1:18:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, what's the deal? Kind of like. So it's weird, cause the first, of course, the first. The first device I tried it on was my Android phone and said, oh, this is not compatible with your device and I thought, okay, is there anything weird going on? It doesn't work on phones of any kind. It does work. It's not WebKit exclusive, because it will work on.

1:19:05 - Leo Laporte
Chrome. It also doesn't work on Firefox. I see, Right.

1:19:08 - Andy Ihnatko
It'll work on Chrome on desktop, so it's not just WebKit limited. But you notice that I asked, as a matter of fact, I asked Apple that night for clarification that okay, so when you get to the page of saying what it's compatible with, that is an all-inclusive list. That yes, it is. So that means that the iPhone cannot not that you'd want to, but it seemed kind of odd that one of the things, one of the great things about making it a website means that anything that runs like a modern web browser should be able to open and run it, but again, apparently not Apparently, it's just for like large screens of some kind.

It's not feature compatible, but in terms of like the stuff that you want to get out of Apple Maps, which is the basic read and write and arithmetic and also the really really cool God, if there's one area in which Apple Maps absolutely trounces Google Maps, it's just so much prettier and so much nicer and so much easier to navigate with your eyes and you get all of that.

1:20:06 - Leo Laporte
One of the nice features is you can incorporate it into your app using MapKit JS or link out to Maps on the web so your website can. But it is a little bit. I think it's a little disadvantage if somebody's on your restaurant website. They click the map and then it says, oh no, you're not running Edge or Chrome or Safari.

1:20:27 - Andy Ihnatko
That's kind of a disadvantage and that's also that also you you have to understand, like, exactly how important google maps is as a platform for shopping and for advertising, that the idea of it's not just getting you rooting information from a to b. It's nice that they have now they have features that will let you get walking directions and transportation directions, but it really is like if you run a business and you want people to be able to find your business, you want to be on google maps.

1:20:53 - Jason Snell
Apple maps is nice but you want to be on google maps and the social media platforms, so to speak.

1:20:58 - Andy Ihnatko
That's behind it of adding content to it and policing that content is also pretty massive. But, yeah, it's great that now it's available it's not just locked into an app that is really accessible to more people and they and it is a beta. When first week of the beta, obviously they say they're going to be adding more platforms and more things to it.

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
So let's see where it is at six months from now yeah, uh, I guess you could say this is a little bit of a tell. Apple tv executives are meeting with the uk tv ratings body. It's called Barb, so when you see a headline that says Apple's meeting with Barb, it is dry sand. Barb is jointly owned by the broadcasters, including BBC, itv, channel 4, and Sky. They provide viewing data. They're basically it's like meeting with Nielsen they provide the viewing data for British TV. So the implication is that Apple TV Plus is thinking about advertising, absolutely, absolutely.

1:22:02 - Alex Lindsay
Not to say I told you so, but I wrote a story in April of last year on Macworld about this and said it was as inevitable as a Ted Lasso spinoff Hasn't happened yet it's going to happen. It'll happen. You'll see Ted Lasso or other characters from that show again because it's inevitable. And this is inevitable because almost every streaming service has an ad tier. And you ask why? And the answer is money. The answer is you will get people who won't buy your service for X price but will buy it for a cheaper price because they don't mind about the ads. And then you get to increase your ad revenue. And I'll tell you, almost every one of these services has found that if you make a cheaper version with ads and then put ads in it, the average revenue per user is higher than their premium product.

1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
And so you're making more money and expanding your total number of subscribers, and it varies.

1:22:58 - Alex Lindsay
Netflix is different from Amazon, but nobody's not doing an ad tier. It gives you the ability to go a little bit cheaper or to raise your premium price and keep the other one there. And they've got a vice president in charge of ad sales. They're putting ads in all sorts of other things. Tv Plus already has ads in all the sports stuff anyway, and so it's inevitable, right, and I don't think Apple's going to do it, where they're going to take everybody and throw them on an ad tier. I think it's more likely that they're going to offer a cheaper tier and see if they can use that as another inducement to get people watching Apple TV Plus. Because the big issue with TV Plus at this point isn't even really its quality or its catalog they're doing pretty well. It's that its overall number of viewers is really low compared to most of the other streamers.

So if this is a way to reach more people who are looking at Apple's selection and going, eh, I don't really want to do that, then you know that'll be good for Apple. I won't ever, you know, watch an ad again on purpose if I can avoid it. But there is, there is financial sense for this and it is just the moment that Netflix said they do it, everybody, everybody's going to do it. Disney's doing it. You know HBO Max, now Max to do it. Disney's doing it. You know HBO Max, now Max has done it. Amazon did it. Everybody will have an ad tier. You won't be forced onto it, but everybody's going to have one, and that includes Apple.

1:24:18 - Jason Snell
And I think it's fine If you're given a free ad tier that has lots of ads. I mean a free ad tier or a very inexpensive ad tier. Cheap ad tier yeah, because there's the one that people have right now. The part that Amazon really, I think, misstepped on is the one that people are already getting. Like every first grader will tell you you can't change the rules, so the thing is that by adding this onto it, it just really made everybody upset.

1:24:44 - Alex Lindsay
Except it worked is the problem, Alex. It worked. They got a huge base and they've made a huge amount of money rolling ads into those places.

1:24:53 - Jason Snell
So I think that sometimes there is a short-term gain and a long-term cost, and maybe Amazon won't pay it. But I can tell you personally my relationship to how I viewed Amazon changed dramatically for $3 a month. I don't know what it was about that it's $3 a month, like I don't know what it was about that it's three dollars a month, and I was like, screw those guys like you know, like and, and me too, and and I'm just like and, and now I'm like I, you know, it's not like I'm not buying anything from amazon, I'm not, like you know, doing whatever, but it definitely took put a huge damper on how I feel about amazon over three dollars a month. You know, and, and, and I think that and it's combined with the fact that you know whole foods is turning into trader joe's, you know, and, and so you, you know, and it just just feel like amazon's manipulating you when you're in whole foods now, um, which is great for farmers markets, because you know, that's where I'm going now I like trader joe's.

1:25:43 - Leo Laporte
What are you saying? What?

1:25:44 - Alex Lindsay
are you trying to say there it's because, they're expensive trader.

1:25:47 - Jason Snell
Joe's no I just don't want to. I just don't want it. All one brand. I go to Whole Foods because it was a collection of brands and it wasn't all one brand. That just makes all the brands yeah, but it was Whole Paycheck, it's now all 365. And what they do is they cut the.

You can't find the things you're buying all the time and then suddenly, oh, there's a whole bunch of 365 there and I've got to the point where I'm so resistant that I won't buy it. Like I'm just like if I, if it's empty, I'm just like I'm going to go somewhere else and and uh, and so the I'm like I'm not going to. I'm not going to be told what to do. And now what I'm doing is I'm buying like 80% of what I eat now at whole uh, farmer's markets because I a month. It shouldn't bother me at all. There's lots of things that go up and down $3 a month in my life. There was just something about it that made me really, you know, it just tweaked me. Like Amazon was like oh, amazon's doing pretty good, and then it was just like you know it's funny because I had the opposite brain damage.

1:26:51 - Leo Laporte
As soon as I saw on the screen coming soon ad supported, you can, we're gonna have ads or you can pay another. Whatever it was eight bucks a month, three I three, is that all? I immediately clicked it. Yeah, it was like. It was like my knee jerked. What happened is I got?

1:26:59 - Jason Snell
I, I didn't see it. I clicked it. I saw the ads, you know, suddenly the ads were there and then there was a whole bunch of wtf like, but not not shortened, and um and uh, you know, like you know just me being mad about like, why am I getting ads and then realizing I had to pay three dollars. And it was just again. It was just something. I think the problem is that I, in in my head, I'm like I spent a lot of money with amazon. I spent a lot of money with amazon and and I'm just like you know, you know it's like thousands of dollars a year with amazon.

1:27:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I was like they should you know, and and it's just me, man they're just a, you know, it's just.

It's just, you know it's just, it's just yeah, and this might be more important for Apple than for the other streamers, because I think we're talking last week, the week before, about analysts' interpretation of what Apple TV Plus's numbers were and, as Jason said, they are not just behind, they are way behind, it's just miserably behind, and also that their growth rate is slow to non-existent, if I remember correctly, and that means that most of the people that that suggests that most of the people that they were going to get they already got. So they got to find people who are not subscribers and figure out why they're not and how to get them on board, and one of the ways could be, just as Apple TV is not, that is not the hub, sort of streaming destination for anybody for any purposes, like for me max is my husband it's like it's.

1:28:15 - Leo Laporte
It's where exactly you have.

1:28:17 - Andy Ihnatko
You have your hub and then you have other services you add to because maybe you like the show or something like that, to get more people to say maybe I can have netflix and apple tv, like they're also packaging things. That's that show you that it's not a destination, it's a nice add-on.

1:28:30 - Jason Snell
I think the hard part is is that my hub is YouTube you know, like so I'm, I'm going to YouTube all the time to watch stuff, and then I'm like oh, maybe you pay for YouTube premium. Happily, yeah, of course, happily best. That's the best. The last subscription I'll give up is YouTube. You know, like you know, it is it. You know, I did a poll on, you know, an unscientific poll on twitter of, like, if you only got to have one service for the next 10 years, which one would you choose?

1:28:56 - Leo Laporte
and youtube was by far but also that doesn't have to do more with the kind of content you like, because youtube you're never going to see a succession on youtube or a game that runs on youtube yeah, I just think.

1:29:09 - Jason Snell
But the thing is, is that there's so much?

1:29:11 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I watch incredible videos about something really obscure yeah, well, like that kind of documentary how-to video, but I don't want to watch that all day. I want to watch. I also like to watch it too.

1:29:24 - Jason Snell
You know it was a daily dose of internet. You know there's a lot of silly stuff on there as well, and I yeah, that's to me, that's uh narrowcase stuff the thing well yeah, the thing is like YouTube has the stuff that you will not be able to find anywhere else.

1:29:38 - Andy Ihnatko
If you like, if you like Game of Thrones, maybe you can find something that is scratches that itch in the same way, however, really no.

Well, the problem is not the brand name, but I mean saying I want something that's similar epic, epic drama, epic drama multi no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Historical garments okay, and she and she is an anesthesiologist okay, her name is so steen okay, but she makes these amazing reproductions of, like, 18th century, 19th century gowns okay. That is not something that's going to wind up like on the discovery channel or on, okay, where she just makes these things and you watch her making them and watch her going to going to places with them and it's amazing. It's the kind of narrow, narrow casting things you could only get there, whereas, like I was able to hop from Netflix to like to, to to max, because I felt as though everything that was really good on Netflix I'd already seen, whereas I hadn't really started to plumb the depths of max yet.

Youtube is the one that I would never leave because there's nothing Similar in content to that. What I was getting at before is that, like, if you can't get game of thrones, you can say well is it? Are you interested in game of thrones? Because you like multi, like epic, epic storytelling on a multi-season level, where the episodes cost tens of millions of dollars and have huge spectacle, huge effects, uh, ongoing like intrigue, uh, written on a very, very huge canvas. Okay, well, there are series on. There are Star Wars, series on Disney that might be able to scratch that itch for you, whereas there is no other channel that has. That is a go-to place for again people who.

a guy who channels like Techmoan where hi? I've got here is a karaoke machine in car use made in Japan in 1978. I fixed it and now here's how the cartridges work.

1:31:35 - Jason Snell
I mean, that's something you can get anywhere else. You know, I, you know, and and the the risk is so much lower for YouTube because they're not making the content. And the thing is is that and that's the hard part that all these streamers are going to have, is that, you know, game of thrones is a good example. It was a great first four seasons and slowly got worse until it's so bad that I would never go back and start watching it again. You know like, because I'm so angry about how it ended, you know, like it was just so. It just I felt like I just got, you know, taken for a ride for the last four seasons.

1:32:01 - Andy Ihnatko
You know just that you just kept on thinking there was a light at the end of the tunnel and it turned out to just be.

1:32:05 - Jason Snell
It turned out to be a train, a train going in a way, you know, and, and so the and. So I think that that's the challenge with a lot of the larger narrative is that you put a bunch of money into it and then is you know, a lot of them are hit and miss, you know, and, and I think that that's really hard for streamers to compete with, when more and more of the next generation is just watching YouTube. I mean my kids, I mean I, my watching habit is probably 80 in youtube, but my kids are 90, 95 and I have a hard time. Like I look at movies, I'm like wow, that's a big commitment for one night. Like I don't know, like it's very hard to get me to watch a whole movie, like a little two hours.

I'm like okay I don't I watch, and that's why I like series, because I like to watch.

1:32:44 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of bad for people like I. Mean, everything on youtube is hyper sensationalized, not not everything. Most of it.

1:32:51 - Jason Snell
Most of it I I want to succeed on youtube.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
You have to hypersensationalize?

1:32:55 - Jason Snell
no, you don't. You don't look at, look at veritasium, like, like, there's someone who's very successful, tom scott. Um, you know, there's a lot of people who are making good money doing things that are, um, you know, chef pk. Uh, you know, there's a whole, a whole variety of folks that are making a good living. What they're not doing is they're not making hundreds of millions of dollars or making $20 million contracts, but there's a lot of people making a quarter million or a half million dollars a year doing their little, you know, doing whatever that they're excited about.

I mean, um, you know, whether it's coloring books or or, um, you know, um, there is Emily D Baker. All she does is looks at the court cases and she used to be a prosecutor and she just talks about them with her community. She sits there and just talking about the court cases. It's done in a stream yard. It's not, you know, particularly shiny thing. It's just really well done by someone who knows what they're talking about.

There's not a lot of bells and whistles and she has show. You'll go up there and she'll have 25 to 30,000 concurrent viewers watching with her, like, you know, like, and, and that is a, and that's a crazy vertical, you know, and she's just really good at it. You know she's got, you know she's got a great personality and she understands what she's talking about, you know, and people, and she knows how to work with her community. And so there's a lot, of, a lot of folks that are, um, you know, again have a staff and are making a living doing what they're doing, and I think that that's amazing, it's flat what's the average length of a YouTube?

1:34:22 - Leo Laporte
uh, show that you watch, would you say. Do you know?

1:34:26 - Andy Ihnatko
um probably about a half an hour eight to ten minutes for me.

1:34:30 - Jason Snell
I mean I don't like if I see a longer one, it just has to be good, like I'll skip very fast, like I'm very when I scroll through my front page on youtube.

1:34:37 - Leo Laporte
I feel like if I start watching any one of these, I'm going to be sucked down a rabbit hole. Yeah, and then four hours later I'm going to come up for air and I will have wasted four hours of watching it just depends on what kind of subscribe random stuff.

1:34:51 - Jason Snell
Well, it depends on what you're subscribing to and what you're watching I'm not subscribed to a bunch of channels and I and I and the channels that I want.

1:34:57 - Leo Laporte
The front page is probably not what I should be looking at.

1:34:59 - Jason Snell
Well, if you're subscribed to a lot of channels and you watch a lot of it, then it becomes what you watch, you know, and so like, very quickly. By the way, you watch a couple cooking channels and you'll see cooking stuff very fast, you know, you know it's, it's very the algorithm is very responsive, um, and so so I think that it is again. I, I think people, when they keep on talking about streamers, they leave youtube out of the conversation. But it is the, it is the gorilla in the room. It is the thing that just keeps growing. It just keeps growing and no one's paying attention that it is a vast majority of the next generation's viewing habits and it is not, you know, like it and and so I think that it's going to be and because you pay for premium, you don't see any ads unless they're, it's unwatchable.

Yeah, you'd see our ads because they're baked in.

1:35:42 - Leo Laporte
But if it's not baked in, you know I should I should?

1:35:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I should point out that last week's uh earnings call uh, they were very proudly proud for Google and alphabet. They're very proud to say that YouTube is the number one streaming platform, according to Nielsen, for like the 17th month in a row, not just like for, not just limited to devices, but, like you know, tv streamers on on actual big screen, like real TV sets. Uh, there's a. There's another number that I didn't really understand, but they were saying that when you combine the reach of every single platform through all mediums, they're number two behind only Disney. So this is YouTube.

1:36:17 - Jason Snell
And the thing is that it's like 90% of my viewing is on a big TV. I don't watch it on my computer. I sit down and watch, and a lot of this has changed because the quality of the cameras, the quality of production, all those to where, you know, a lot of YouTubers are producing content higher than the broadcasters. So the YouTubers are doing 4k short depth of field, great audio, great, you know, at a level that is higher oftentimes than what you're seeing on broadcast, and so that's changed over the last five years. It's just, it's shifted and they've gone past that. And again, you're, I think there's a lot of really thoughtful. Another one that was really good a good example of a great show Chloe Abrams is. She just did one on the whole thing about shoes, you know, in the Olympics, like what shoes you're allowed to wear and what you're allowed to do, and, and it's just fantastically, hosted, edited, fantastically, uh, hosted, edited. I mean it. It is a it. It it's competitive with anything that you see on broadcast. Um, you know, as far as you know, and it's, and she's, you know she's a great host. But the thing is, is that that is, um, this is the future, you know, and she's got three and a half million followers. You know, like she's not, I'm I don't know what, I don't know what she's making, but I bet you it's enough to live on and have a staff and have editors and you know everything else that she's doing and so, and so I think that there are, and it's a really highly, I think, higher produced than a lot, of, a lot of TV segments that I see, but they're one segment at a time. They don't have to figure out how to fit it into between segment four and segment eight, you know, or in the B block or whatever. It's just however long it takes. And it's a really, you know, and she's interviewing people. She went to Nike and had them cut a a a thing in half.

She talks about the different suits, it's you know, and there's lots of them. So there's lots of. I mean there's a lot of educational content on I I I guess I would say I learn a lot more and I'm a lot I it's. It's much more mentally fulfilling to watch YouTube the way I watch it at least than anything I see on the streaming apps. You know, like, like, I love watching presumed innocent and I'm very proud that my brother did a lot of the camera work on it, and I watch it. I don't feel like that's improving my knowledge base, but I do enjoy it, and so I think that these are. That's incredible it's different.

1:38:29 - Alex Lindsay
It's it just scratches a different itch. I was gonna just put in a plug for technology connections, which is one of these things that like it's super nerdy. Uh, it's just a, a guy wearing a t-shirt and a and a blazer sitting in front of a, an ikea calax like the one I've got behind me, but with some better lighting, and you know it's super nerdy, but it's. It's very thoughtful and and those videos are like 25 minutes long and um, they're really good and and like there's a lot of really good content. There's a lot of bad content on youtube. There's a lot of good content on youtube. And then I've also been fascinated.

So likemaster, which is one of my favorite shows they have. It's based in the UK, but they've got worldwide, outside the UK, rights to their their stuff, including their spinoffs, and they have a service you can pay for. That's called Taskmaster Supermax Plus, I think, because they want to go all the way and you can pay and get all their content. But the fact is they put it all on YouTube and if you're a YouTube premium subscriber, it's ad free. It's literally the same product on YouTube that it is in a standalone service. So they're using YouTube for that and they're monetizing it one of two ways. They either get your YouTube premium money or they get your ad money, and either way they've made it work. So there's a bunch of.

I was a deep skeptic of youtube premium for a long time, and now I I in part because the ads are so bad.

1:39:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I can't live without it and I and I feel better about it, that's their business model.

1:39:52 - Alex Lindsay
I get it like I. I started doing uh on one of my podcasts. I started doing ad insertion and the ads are really annoying and one of the reasons I did it is I. I held off until the moment where I realized I can now offer an ad-free version for members and the bad dynamically inserted ads are a business model. They're basically like they do generate money for me, but also they allow me to say do you want to live?

1:40:18 - Leo Laporte
like this. Maybe you should pay. That's not why we're inserting those terrible ads in this show.

1:40:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's not why we're inserting those terrible ads in this show. We know, I mean it's a little bit of both Trying to make you hate us so that you subscribe.

1:40:28 - Jason Snell
But but the you know, like, you look at like there was a, there's a, there's a movie, something that got posted like three weeks ago, where it says I was an MIT educated neurosurgeon and now I'm unemployed and alone in the mountains how did I get here?

And and it it the um by gooby and doobie. So you look at that going, what is going on here, and it has 9.8 million views and it is an excellent video. It is a devastating, uh commentary on the health system by someone who was a neurosurgeon, like, and he just said I had to stop because there's a bunch of things that will make you better and surgery might not be one of them, and I can't tell you that as a doctor, you know, and he just and he walks through it and he walks through his path, and it's one camera on a tripod with no production value. I mean it's him, him in the corner showing it. I mean it's just, you know there's a, you know this is what it looks like. I mean, it's just, it's just um, you know, that's it. It's just him in a camera talking in that corner, and but it's the story that mattered, you know, and that would never go on TV.

You know like and that's the whole thing you know you would never get that on TV, and so you see, and again, there's plenty of horrible stuff, but there's plenty of horrible stuff on TV as well. I just find that as a you know, when we remember that the bookstores that used to be around, all over 90% of the um you know, 90 of the bookstore, 95 of the bookstore was non-fictional content. There was five percent that was fictional and we have to remember that what people oftentimes were buying, most of the books we buy, are about things that we love, not about. You know. Well, for a lot of people, not about things, and that's what youtube is really good at.

1:41:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, all I can say is that, like, uh, again, I pay for a bunch of streaming services. Uh, it doesn't even feel with youtube, as we've all been saying. It doesn't feel like I'm paying of streaming services. Uh, it doesn't even feel with YouTube, as we've all been saying. It doesn't feel like I'm paying for streaming services I'm. It's like I'm paying for. You know that thorn in the heel of your foot that represents ads on this platform. We will pull that out for you for a small fee every month. That's, that's what I pay for. But of all the platforms, nothing gives me that.

Uh, dopamine, serotonin, whatever you call it. Rush of like, pleasure of like clicking a subscription, saying, oh, super, super fast. Matt has a new video, oh, great, you know what? I'm gonna save that for a treat later on today. I'm so looking forward to watching that and I just want to be in a good mood. I want to be like all, like, focusing on it, stuff like that, whereas, like, I'm starting to read, I'm starting to binge. Like the seasons of the crown that that I missed. I still love it. I think it's a great show, but it's not. Oh, there's new seasons of the crown that I haven't seen yet. It's like oh, I'm gonna, it's youtube.

1:42:50 - Leo Laporte
Youtube just has scratches, an itch that nothing else can scratch I think it's a dopamine hit and you're actually an addict, but that's okay, whatever makes you I mean the last.

1:43:01 - Jason Snell
The last, the last series in the over a year that I've been that excited about was andor, like you know, like, oh, there's a new andor, but that's like. But it's like once a year that I think that, oh, I'm real, I'm like, oh, I guess I'll go watch the other one I'm sure nothing provides the buzz that, uh, but again, youtube does, except maybe instagram or most of what I'm watching, except for daily dose of internet.

Most of what I'm which I love, um, most of what I'm watching, except for Daily Dose of Internet, most of what I'm watching which I love. Most of what I watch is all nonfiction. Like it's all about things that I'm interested in, like it's not. I barely ever watch anything. Oh, and trailers. I watch a lot of trailers. I have a whole shelf. Youtube's figured out that it should put a shelf right below the main thing of trailers, because I'll just sit there and watch one after the other which I mean watch one after the other, which I mean fair enough.

1:43:41 - Alex Lindsay
But to bring it back to apple tv, I will say I think their content's really great, and I've really. I I am shocked at how good a job those guys have done programming that uh and they are also adding and they're adding kind of a relevant package of uh back catalog films as well.

they did that as an experiment and sounds like they may stick with that, so they're creating value in there and you, the longer they go, the more of a back catalog they've got. The challenge is to get people to try it, especially outside of that core Apple sphere that they've already reached, and if a cheaper version with ads is a way for them to get those people in, then they will do it. But I've been very happy.

I think the stuff is really good. They have done a shocking, especially as I'm a sci-fi fan. Their sci-fi stuff has been excellent, like really good high top shelf kind of stuff, and so, yeah, I'm a fan. I did not expect Apple TV Plus to be as high in my ranking of streaming services.

1:44:38 - Leo Laporte
It feels like it's gotten better over the last few years.

1:44:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, they've learned? Yeah, I think they have, and they've leaned into the things they're good at. I mean, there's a limit. They're not going to lose, you know, billions of dollars on this thing, but I I think they have spent their money pretty well and made a bunch of uh, of very good shows, I mean, and there's always another one the, the, yeah, and I think that the thing, I think their hit rate is much higher in the sense that I give apple the benefit of the doubt.

1:45:02 - Jason Snell
When I see a new thing I'm like it's not I like everything, but I look at and go. If I think I might like it, I'm pretty likely to go watch it, because I know that the, the production value is going to be off the charts, the, you know it's going to be a well-made show and if it has any chance at all, it's going to work, you know. And so, and you know, I think that again, presumed innocent silo, which I enjoyed a lot, you know. Coming back, by the way, yeah, I can't wait. And so that those are, those are ones Sorry.

1:45:29 - Alex Lindsay
Great, no, just great show. I mean I really enjoyed Dark Matter, silos coming back and I like sugar.

1:45:36 - Jason Snell
I enjoyed sugar.

1:45:37 - Alex Lindsay
I mean sugar was good.

1:45:38 - Leo Laporte
Slow horses is great Slow horses. How about that time, bennett? Slow Horses is great Slow Horses is great.

1:45:43 - Jason Snell
How about that Time Bandits, anybody watching? That I'm going to watch it, mostly because I love the original. I've read enough reviews that I'm a little worried, but I'm still going to watch it because it's Apple and because I think that it could be funny.

1:45:53 - Alex Lindsay
And Severance is coming early next year too.

1:45:55 - Leo Laporte
Severance is a classic Severance coming back is probably very good for them, and I good for them and I would bet, yeah, that they will announce ads right before severance, and I think that what I'm hoping is is that apple doesn't try to water it down too much.

1:46:08 - Jason Snell
Just keep making great things that you're that are, you know very, very good, and then buy up the stuff that you, that is, you know, fill the I I get. I think that model that they're going towards is buy a bunch of somebody else's catalog to kind of fill in the gaps and then just keep building really high quality, you know content that makes even hbo go.

1:46:25 - Leo Laporte
That's that cliff is really high, yeah, so I have to uh, I have to watch dark matter. I feel like I started it, but I can't remember what it was about. Is that the one where he has two lives?

1:46:36 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, it's a parallel universe story and it picks up as it goes and I think it really does uh, actually interrogate its premise pretty well. It's no counterpart. Counterpart is the classic. That's a every worth the watch of anybody. I don't know where it is now if it's on Netflix, but that's a two season and done show. That was one of the best of the last decade. But dark matter on TV plus is good.

Jennifer Connelly is in that and it is a parallel universe story and a parallel universe story and at the beginning you think this is a simplistic parallel universe story being used to tell a very basic premise about, like, what if you lived a different life? And then I I just for people who I've talked to, people who've watched one or two, and they're like, yeah, I know, it's sort of what I expected I said no, no, no, keep going, because it gets weirder because that's what happened.

We watched one as it goes and really does. I mean the idea that you could travel between parallels. It does not shy away from that in the least, and it in the end I ended up loving it.

1:47:31 - Leo Laporte
Apple should do more weird stuff and experimental stuff and take some more chances. I feel like they have. They're in the best position to do that.

1:47:41 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, they swung really hard for foundation and swing and a miss, no.

1:47:46 - Alex Lindsay
I, I, I really disagree I think season two of foundation was fantastic.

1:47:50 - Jason Snell
I didn't get through season one.

1:47:53 - Alex Lindsay
Season one is a tough a tough road. Season two is excellent Um but, that is, you want to talk about weird. That is a weird show, but I loved it. Season two was really good.

1:48:03 - Leo Laporte
I will give you credit April 2023, Jason Snell called it. Why ads on Apple TV are as inevitable as a Ted Lasso spinoff. Still waiting for that?

1:48:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but come on, I mean come on. Do you think we're never going to see Roy Kent again? Or Ted Lasso?

1:48:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I do not believe that they're just waiting for Hannah to hear a number she likes.

1:48:24 - Alex Lindsay
I actually heard there was some story that suggested that even Jason Sudeikis is now sort of like yeah, so come on, the money is there.

1:48:34 - Leo Laporte
The number go up obviously yes. Back the truck up. All right, let's take a little break when we come back your picks of the week. All right, let's take a little break when we come back your picks of the week. I do want to say that, uh, we do have an ad free version of what we do if you can't stand those awful ads that we insert. I never really thought of as a strategy.

1:48:56 - Alex Lindsay
We're just desperate to sell that to make it bad for them, but it but I. What what I did is I wouldn't go down that route, even though I was giving my podcast away for free and not making any money on it, until I had the ability to let people become a member and get a version without the ads yes, like I wasn't going to inflict that on them unless there was a way to go out, a way out and then you choose, you choose your.

You know if you want to support us directly or indirectly, that's fine.

1:49:24 - Leo Laporte
We really appreciate the support in the community we have surrounded ourselves with. It's what allows us to continue on in adverse times. I just saw a big article it was the Wall Street Journal about the top five podcasts make all the money and it's like $100 million to call her daddy, hundred million dollars to Emma to Call Her daddy. And so we just want to keep doing. We want to do the humble little thing that we do here at twit and we want to keep doing it and we want to do it with your support and if we can, that would be great. Club TWiT is seven dollars a month. You can pay more if you, you know, if you're so moved, you say, wow, this is worth $10 a month. That's great, we'll take it. But we start, I think, fairly low so that you can do it.

All the shows are ad-free. You get video and shows that we only put out in audio, like Hands on Mac, hands on Windows, iOS Today, the Untitled Linux Show, home Theater, geeks with Scott Wilkinson All of those are club shows, and in the club, in video, you also get access to the entire community. In discord actually only about half of the people who become members you end up in discord, that's up to you, but the discord is a great place to hang and it is where our live ad hoc programming will always start. twit.tv/clubtwit. If you want to participate in this experiment, if you like what you see on twit and you want us to do more, uh, and you know, we'll just take this as your vote. If, and you know, vote, vote accordingly. twit.tv/clubtwit. We appreciate all of our wonderful club members who have absolutely made this show, uh, possible. Without you, there really wouldn't be a show. Let's get our. Let's begin with our picks of the week with Jason Snell. Jason.

1:51:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you know. So I got this summer some new tech toys attached to my house. I have a solar system which finally did it, finally redid the roof and that allowed me to do solar. And at the same time I decided to upgrade, because then you've got all that electricity from a propane, from a gas heater to an electric heat pump.

1:51:36 - Leo Laporte
We did the same thing because we had solar.

1:51:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so great. Well, as a nerd, what I got with that was two new embedded intelligent systems, a solar system and an HVAC controller, and both of them are proprietary. Neither of them supports HomeKit. They both have really weird apps and this is why I'm going to do it. I can't believe nobody has picked it before.

I'm going to tell you the secret is Homebridge. Homebridge.wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwio. It's free. You can put it on a Raspberry Pi. If you've got a Mac you use as a server, like I do, you can just install it on your Mac. But what it does is it's an open source project with a whole bunch of plugins that people make. You can build your own if you're so inclined, and I have almost never. There was one. I bought an Alexa fan that I could not get on my network. I don't know why. Like nobody, nobody built a plugin for that, but Homebridge I run it for a few things that I've got on my network. I've got a really nice little IR programmable dealie that's not HomeKit enabled, but I was able to train it and then put it on HomeKit and then use it to control the heater that I have in my office in the winter. I've got my weather station on it. I've got an air sensor. I've got my washing machine on it. I've got an air sensor, I've got my washing machine on it. Okay, I can do it. I can do it, even though none of those things support HomeKit and it gets all in my home app. I've got an old Wemo switch that doesn't support it. It's in there. It's great. It makes non-HomeKit things work with HomeKit. You just have to have it running somewhere in your house on a Raspberry Pi, which is super cheap, or on a Mac that you've got or some other computer that's around.

So what did I do Yesterday? I sat down and typed in the plugin search engine inside of HomeBridge the name of my solar system and it said here's the plugin and I had to put in like I had to turn on. I had to flip a switch in the settings to like allow API access and I had to put in my username and my API key and it will allow me to create little switches to say how charged is my solar battery, how much sun is the solar array getting, whatever I want. Then I searched for my HVAC controller, because it's this very weird. It's guys, it's super weird.

Remember Windows Phone? It looks like Windows Phone. It's all lowercase. It's like Metro it's all lowercase and it sort of goes off the edge. I'm like, was this designed 15 years ago? Probably it was, but you know what it turns out. If you go into the settings and you turn on their API key, you don't even need it sends you an API key. You don't actually even need the API key for this thing, as long as the API gets lit up, because there's a plugin for Homebridge and I put in my username and my ID and my password in there and, boom, I now have a thermostat in HomeKit in my home app that controls my new HVAC system.

So what I'm saying is I can't guarantee that all the smart devices that don't use HomeKit in your life are going to be in HomeBridge, but mine were and on top of that, homebridge has gotten a lot better.

It used to be able to edit like a JSON file and you can still do that, but the UI to edit that stuff in a web interface is much better than it used to be. So anyway, I highly recommend. If you've got stuff that you're frustrated, they only work with Alexa, or maybe they have a weird API, but they just aren't supported by the Home app or any Home app at all. There's probably a Homebridge plugin for it at this point. There's probably a Homebridge plugin for it at this point. Like, literally, my weather station does not support any smart home anything, but it's got a little web server in it that serves out Jason data and somebody wrote a plugin for it, and now all that weather system data is in my home app as well, I have a folder on my phone that has 17 different apps in it for controlling stuff in my house.

1:55:50 - Jason Snell
I went out and got the HA Green.

1:55:52 - Leo Laporte
The Home Assistant thing. Do you think Homebridge is better than Home Assistant? They're just different.

1:55:57 - Alex Lindsay
Home Assistant seems like it's more to me. It's just you really got to think like Home Assistant and live your life that way, but they're different.

1:56:06 - Leo Laporte
I've been I've been using for a long time. Yeah, um, but it's um yeah it's, it's just good.

1:56:13 - Alex Lindsay
Not only does it put it in the home app, which is nice, but also it means you can use automations so you can tie different things. So like literally, you can have it, be that you've got like a motion sensor and you've got a thing that doesn't support home kit, but now is on your home app and you can use the motion sensor to trigger that other device. Or I've got it for all my like for using my heater in the in the winter. That is on a home, a home kit timer. That's how it automates itself, and and it's based on a temperature sensor that lives in my office. So once you get it in the Home app, anything is possible.

1:56:50 - Leo Laporte
Homebridgeio and it's for HomeKit.

1:56:55 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the whole point is to bridge stuff into HomeKit. You're taking stuff that talks to something else, whether it's the Google Home stuff or Alexa Home stuff, or just like it's a smart device that's got its own little controller that it uses to talk to its app. All of that stuff you can bridge it and then it's in the Home app.

1:57:12 - Leo Laporte
Nice and because community support is good.

1:57:15 - Jason Snell
I've been trying to control my pool pump for my iPhone for I don't know how long and I just looked at it and sure enough it's supported.

1:57:21 - Alex Lindsay
I was just like oh nice, Right, because there are people out there I mean, and all these plugins I mean, they're just, they're GitHub pages basically, so they're all open source. You can see it. It's using Node, so it's doing JavaScript is the language behind it and little JSON files. But you know it's not zero maintenance. But it's gotten a lot better. It used to be that every week I was in there trying to fix something with it, but for the last couple of years it's pretty much it just runs and they re-architected it. So now each plugin can run as its own separate process, which has actually helped the stability a lot. Now it just runs those in the background and, like I said, so lightweight that you can buy a super cheap what a 15 raspberry pi, set up and and leave it on and you got it thank you, Jason.

1:58:10 - Leo Laporte
I am running home and installing it on my synology after the show. Perfect, uh, andy naco.

1:58:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Pick of the week uh, one of the biggest things I got to do every hour of every day of every week is basically keep track of web pages, because that's where I do a lot of research, that's where I learn a lot of news from, that's where, like by my short-term memory, is basically what was I thinking about, what was I researching, what was I fixated on, what more am I thinking about working on for the next two or three days is somewhere in my, in my web links. Recently, I've kind of made that not just, uh, not just saving and organizing bookmarks too. I want to make sure that I actually keep a copy of the web page as it was when I discovered it, because, a sometimes these things go away. B sometimes especially when it's like research papers they might change stuff or they might decide that, oh, that we shouldn't put that up, that sort of thing, uh, and I've got, I've been using the single file plug-in that just downloads stuff into it, downloads a web page that you're looking at into an html file that anything can look at. However, I came across an app just just the other day called good links that I'm starting to try out. I can go to goodlinksapp and it's available on the app store. It's an app for the entire platform mac, mac and ios that activates with a plug-in and it will, when you send it a link, it will download all the content of that. It will strip out the ads, it will turn into like a reader friendly sort of format and keep it locally on your device. The links themselves are synced across icloud. The copy of the web page that you save unfortunately is only local to the device that you save it on, but that might be okay for you.

The reason why it came to my attention was they just released version 2.0, which added a really neat feature that is very much in my interest. The original version allowed you to add tags so that if I want to find out, give me every web page about uh website that I that I bookmarked, about uh artificial intelligence, you know it'll get those tags for you. Now it also allows you to save highlights, so if there's something specifically that I wanted to refer back to, it will also save those markers and those highlightings. It's a very and it's also a very, very mature app, uh, the. It does support, for instance, automation, uh, both with shortcuts and with apple scripts, so you can do things like I want to. I take this web page, but also turn it to markdown and then put it into this ulysses project, uh, if it's a conditional upon what tag that I've I've added. I added it to when I used the the web page excuse me, the chrome or the safari plug-in to save it. So very, very sophisticated app.

Another thing I like about it, though, is that it's 10 bucks and it's not a subscription fee. For 10 bucks, you own it, uh, and will work forever. The policy that they give you is that, for a year, every update that we make to this app you will also get for free. After a year, you'll have what you have, but if you want to update to something that has more features, we'll give you an app purchase for it. So it seems like a nice compromise between I bought it, I bought it and downloaded it, but I lost out on something cool that was happening a few months later versus. I have to try to justify. Is this worth five bucks a month? To me, nope, 10 bucks seems like a very fair price, and it seems like I. I have to say this is not an app that I've been using for months and months and months. This is something I just came across a few days ago, but I'm liking it enough to recommend it other people good find.

2:01:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm gonna try this. Good links from good links dot app. Thank you, andy. Ten dollars at your favorite app store, mr uh, alex lindsay. Pick of the week time.

2:01:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, my, my minor pick is dengue fever. I just saw them last night in petaluma at log.

2:01:48 - Leo Laporte
You don't want to catch dengue fever. You don't want to catch. It's a band. I don't recommend. You mentioned that before because I remember what a terrible name that was it's, it's a.

2:01:58 - Jason Snell
This is a cambodian surf rock.

2:02:00 - Leo Laporte
Um oh wow uh it's so much great they were so much.

2:02:04 - Jason Snell
If you see them coming live, uh, they're really really fun live. We listen to them all the time at work because, uh, they I don't understand any of the words and so I can look.

2:02:11 - Leo Laporte
It's high energy and fun without getting caught up, it doesn't distract you, it doesn't distract me, and so when you say you don't understand the words, is it in cambodia and come here?

2:02:19 - Jason Snell
oh, yeah and uh the lead singer is is come here and uh, but they're out of la um, but uh, anyway, it's really just such a fun band and there was so much fun to see live yes, last night at lagunitas.

Uh, so um I wish I'd known they were there, I would have, I should have, I should have told you, I should have told you guys, because we just had such a great time next time, yeah, yeah, um, the uh. My my pick for the week, though and I thought we had talked about this before, but I looked at the MBW picks and it wasn't there this is the Express 4M2 from OWC, and I use this all day. I have that too, I love it.

And so you can put four MVMEs in here and up to eight terabytes, so you can have it be a 32-terabyte little box with no moving parts and you can throw it in your bag and it's up to 2800 megabytes a second. So it's not as fast as an internal drive on a studio, but it's very, very fast and so I can throw it's my, it's my main data drive on my studio yeah, and so it is just, and I, I just, we hadn't made it a pick.

Um, it's a usbc or thunderbolt? Um, do you use apple raid?

2:03:21 - Leo Laporte
it comes with the owc's raid.

2:03:23 - Jason Snell
I think I use the owc raid soft rate, yeah, yeah, software, because I just want to go from computer to computer and not think about it right, and so, um, and it is super reliable. I've used these for now for four years I think three or four years, and I've got a couple of them and, um, it's just a really great to. You know, you come back with a bunch of camera files and just throw them all on here or even on site because it's so small and you can and it's fast. You know it's a big deal when I'm on site to be able to clear all the drives as fast as possible. When you combine this with, like a blackmagic dock, you can get, you know, put four of them in, start transferring, go back to what you were doing, um, and then get to editing and I keep all my files, like I'll put all my directories and everything else on it and then I just move it around and it's anyway, it's, it's great.

The enclosure itself is like two or three hundred bucks, it's not very expensive. And then you just buy the mbmes you want. You can buy them from owc. They're they, they check their rate, their memory really well, but you can put other things in there as well. It's great, yeah, yeah I highly recommend it.

2:04:24 - Leo Laporte
The only thing I negative is I've, after a couple of years, the fan's starting to make noise, starting to rattle. I have to. I'm sure I can open it up and replace it, but I haven't had that problem.

2:04:31 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah, it's um, but I just hit, it stops it's probably not right the drive.

2:04:38 - Jason Snell
It's all memory, so well, that's the thing.

2:04:40 - Leo Laporte
It's ssds, I don't care. Yeah, very good recommendation the owc express 4 m2 for 4 and vme m.2 ssd slots. Alex lindsay, is it office hours, dot global. What are you doing these days? Every morning, something exciting.

2:04:59 - Jason Snell
We were talking about ltx studio today. Um, we were talking, we were doing a lot of ai, you know discussion. We talked about AI and enterprise yesterday. Ltx Studio is an AI video but we're trying to keep everybody up to speed on those things, but a very consistently wide range of subjects. We're going to talk about how audio is done for Carnival tomorrow.

2:05:22 - Leo Laporte
Mobile Carnival music music. I love it so it's how.

2:05:24 - Jason Snell
It's how they manage the audio on the floats on the floor.

So we, we have someone, uh, uh, I believe from trinidad or whatever, that's gonna come on and talk about, like what it takes to put those things together, um, but also infrastructural I mean uh, you know, in uh, information security, uh systems is on Friday, so we it's different every day and we now have an extra hours because we didn't have enough shows, and that's on Monday nights and Monday at 6pm Pacific Standard Time just more relaxed version of office hours mostly and then that's where we're building all of our cloud infrastructure, so we're using Vector to do that show there, all of our cloud infrastructure, so we're using Vector to do that show there.

And we had great, really great gray matter last week with Michael Krasny, kelly Corrigan, who is she's an interviewer on PBS as well as a New York Times bestselling author, and I can just listen to that woman talk all day. She's one of those people that just tells great stories and is very authentic and just talks about what she talks about and just so it was a great, really great interview. I think it just came out this morning, so I'd highly recommend checking it out.

2:06:31 - Leo Laporte
Very good, that's at graymatter.show. Andy WGBH in Boston is a calling yes.

2:06:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Week from Thursday go to wgbhnews.org to stream it live or later nice thank you, mr.

2:06:46 - Leo Laporte
Not go. The library is nice. I think it's a good spot for you. It's fiber, that's Ethernet, it's everything you, a boy could want.

2:06:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, the table here is not pre-cluttered with all of my garbage always, always a good thing always a good thing, Jason Snell, sixcolors.com.

2:07:07 - Leo Laporte
Of course you'll have the six color graphs later this week. So many after apple's uh earnings call, and we'll talk about that next Tuesday. What else is going on in the snow land?

2:07:18 - Alex Lindsay
I, I mean it's that and the uh, the betas and apple intelligence and trying to work on that, we'll cover it all. On sixcolors.com. It'll be a busy week. We were all Dan Morin and I were both out last week, so Six Colors was quiet and now we're revving the engine back up and, yeah, going to be a busy August, I think.

2:07:34 - Leo Laporte
Lots of podcasts too at sixcolors.com. Slash Jason Yep. Thank you, Jason, great to have you here. Good to be back next week. Our last max to mac uh break weekly in the studio.

We'll say farewell to the brick house studio as we move over to the attic studio. We'll also say farewell to our dear I said east side, didn't I? Oh, it's not the brick house, it's the east side. There are bricks, but it's not made of bricks, uh, like the brick house was. Uh, we'll also be saying farewell to our beloved studio manager.

Hey, hey, mr John Slanina, who is, uh, who is moving, is retiring for the second time. He retired to come to work here and now, 15 years later, he's finally decided he should really, really retire. And you're gonna go fishing, right? No, watch, I'm freeze McGee all year round. That's the dream, uh, we love you, john, and it will be very, very hard to come to work every day knowing that you will not be here. Uh, john will be here for the remaining 12 days and then it's off to bigger and better things.

Uh, thank you all for joining us, especially a thanks to our club members who make this show and all that we do here possible, one of the reasons we're shutting down the studio is because of its great expense. We don't want to spend that money. We want to spend your money wisely, creating content. If you'd like to join the club, we'd love to have you twit.tv/clubtwit. We do this show on and we're going to continue to do it on Tuesday mornings, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern. I might even be on time. That'll be kind of that'll be a novel thing. Uh, 1800 utc.

You can watch us live on many, many platforms now, thanks to Restream. We are not just on Youtube. We're in the discord for club members. We're on youtube.com/twit/live, twitch.tv/twit. We are on LinkedIn, Facebook, x.com and Kick. So there are many, many ways you can watch us live, uh. But if you don't want to, if you want to watch at your leisure, we invite you to join the website twit.tv/mbw. You can download this show or any of our previous shows directly from the website. There is a Youtube channel dedicated to the video of mac break weekly. That's available to all. Probably the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically as long as you listen. If you stop listening, most podcast players stop downloading, so keep listening and we'll see you next time. But as I have said for so many years, it is time once again to say get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next week.