MacBreak Weekly 933 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 Mac Break Weekly, our last episode in the Eastside Studio. We've gathered the gang. Jason Snell is here, Andy Ihnatko and, of course, Alex Lindsay. We will talk about Apple's results, including colorful charts, Don't you worry. Thanks to Jason Snell, We'll also talk about Apple intelligence, Apparently it's been told. Whatever you do, don't hallucinate. Well, that's a relief. And will Google's lawsuit loss to the DOJ hurt Apple's services business? All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

0:00:38 - VO
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT.

0:00:47 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 933. Recorded Tuesday, August 6th 2024: Giant Bill Gates. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news on which we cover the never should end a sentence with a preposition uh, hello there. Jason Snell, thank you for being with us on Sunday on our last twit in the studio. You are now on the last mac break weekly in the east side yes, except I'm not there.

0:01:19 - Jason Snell
I'm here, so yeah, preview.

0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
This is a preview it's going to feel like, and we are in fact using the new technology to do this it's good. Good, leo, you're gonna, you're gonna love it, you're gonna love it it's a good adaptation, but you're gonna love it yeah, I asked Lisa, can we have a? Can we have Wednesday lunch still, but it'll be our house secret you don't have to wear pants I have. Yes, that's. I've kind of figured that out it's an old anchorman trick.

0:01:46 - Jason Snell
You don't have to wear pants, you're not in the workplace, do anchorman? Not wear pants, they just wear shorts and stuff like well, yeah, I mean they're comfy, okay, they're comfy, yeah, they're comfy I can wear.

You know what I was thinking I can wear my white socks and no one will know I had a friend who was a an intern at a local television station in san francisco and they redesigned their set so that the table didn't have a front, so you could see their legs, and everybody was furious because they had to wear pants.

0:02:10 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical that's Andy Ihnatko, who always wears cargo shorts. Hello Andrew.

0:02:15 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, no, I'm not wearing cargo shorts, I'm wearing dockers shorts. It has one extra pocket for the phone, but that's it I.

0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
That was your pick of the week a couple of weeks ago and I actually ordered a pair with a 32 inch waist. I don't know, I must have been drunk. I don't know what I was thinking maybe someday you have a good self-image.

0:02:35 - Andy Ihnatko
That's where a little lower.

0:02:36 - Leo Laporte
We're a lot lower below the boiler, and then you're fine uh, and alex lindsey, office hoursbal, who also was in on Sunday, nice, to see you. Alex, how did that Vision Pro thing go? Did you look at it?

0:02:49 - Alex Lindsay
It went really well. It looked good. Yeah, absolutely. We want to remarry the audio from the show back into it, so we're going to get that from you, but outside of that, I think it looked really good we had people that were watching.

Some people told us that was the longest time they've ever watched anything on their Vision Pro, and so it was two and a half, I think, over two and a half hours and it ran really well. So we're excited. We're planning to do more. We were just working on some more stuff this morning, so it was good.

0:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Once we get the audio married in, which is not going to be trivial because the lip sync drifts and so you have to kind of sync- it.

0:03:25 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, it'll be close. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, some people said well, I kind of liked it because it felt like you were in the room.

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah because it was just the microphone on the camera.

0:03:33 - Alex Lindsay
The mics on the camera actually are a little spatial, so you actually get a feeling of left and right, and so I think that it was kind of a mixed bag, but I think we're going to have a version of that. People should still go up and sign up for that so that they can. We'll send out an email, or I won't send out an email, but StreamVoodoo will send out an email to folks that have signed up. So I think that's, and all you got to do is just go to streamvoodoocom, slash spatial Sign up for that. That goes into their mailing list and then, if you don't, it's probably not worth it uh, yeah, and we will.

0:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we'll make that somehow available. We'll figure it out. You can download it somehow. Yeah, yeah, we're working on that, yeah, there was that at uh at one point? 738 vision pro users watching, it was 787. Yeah, it was surprised me, it was uh a lot there's not.

0:04:20 - Alex Lindsay
You know there's not a lot to do every day, so you know, on a vision pro. So if you see something that's happening on a vision pro, everyone's like play, you know. So I think that's the big advantage right now is they're they did sell I don't know three or four hundred thousand and they don't have very much to look at on a daily basis. You know delivery is.

I think apple didn't knock this out of the park. As far as having high, you know they're leaning. They're leaning way too much on developers to do it and not putting out enough of their own content or not contracting with enough people to Apple's been very historically been very rough about not wanting to pay people to make things for them, and much more than I mean they're much more stingy about that than many other companies that will spend a lot of money on those things and it's a really great way to turn it and I think what we're seeing is the result of that, of Apple wanting to build it and assuming that they're going to come, and you know they're not coming as fast as you know they're not getting there as fast as Apple would like them to. Cool For sure.

0:05:20 - Jason Snell
Did we just step into the Vision Pro segment here? Is that what happened?

0:05:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, step into the vision pro segment here. Is that what?

0:05:29 - Jason Snell
happened. Oh, what do you see, what do you know? Come on, you could do it.

0:05:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he's scrambling you might as well play the other part I have two I have two vision pro items I can get to you.

0:05:39 - Jason Snell
Oh, all, right, let's do the vision pro thing, um, here here?

here's what they are, because, you know alex is right, there's not enough content on the vision pro. However, what here here? Here's what they are, cause you know Alex is right, there's not enough content on vision pro. However, what there are more of now are environments. Disney updated the Disney plus app to add a new environment that they did so. One of the Disney family of companies is national geographic. They took a bunch of high-risk photography in Iceland and built an immersive environment so you can watch Disney Plus content now, not just at Avengers Tower and on the scare floor of Monsters Inc, but you can do it in the snow or beneath the Aurora in Iceland. And then today, Paramount Plus came out with a new immersive environment that also has a game in it in the Paramount Plus app, which is a pineapple, came out with a new immersive environment that also has a game in it in the Paramount Plus app, which is a pineapple a certain pineapple under a certain sea the SpongeBob environment, which has also been brought out now.

However, I love environments. I think environments are one of the best things in the Vision Pro. However, I will point out once again the strange omission even in Vision OS 2, which is apps that build these amazing environments into their apps, cannot donate them to the system. So you can only go to Iceland to watch something in Disney Plus. You can't go there to write an article or browse the web or check your email. You can only use it in that app, and likewise SpongeBob you can only use in the Paramount Plus app. So I feel like Apple is really missing an opportunity to take advantage of some of this great content that way?

0:07:11 - Leo Laporte
Do you think it's Apple or do you think it's Paramount?

0:07:14 - Jason Snell
No, I think it's Apple. I think Apple has not provided them with an API. Apple has clearly given Disney and Paramount the ability to build these things right, which is probably they're probably working with Apple on it. These things right, which is probably they're probably working with apple on it, but what they haven't done is provide some sort of vision, os way to integrate those into the system environments, which would be awfully swell.

0:07:33 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, so you feel like this is all your work under the sea and a pineapple I feel like this is a similar to the not getting watch faces. Apple doesn't want people to screw up, screw up the system, and they they're just like. We'll think about that for a little while.

0:07:47 - Jason Snell
I think it's not like watch faces in the sense that it would be a clear win and I think it's a lot easier for Apple to do it and that it would be a lot less of a control thing than a watch face where there's, I think, they have bigger concerns there about it. Also, I mean, let's be honest, vision Pro, like you would have to approve, for example, you would have to approve, for example, you would have to approve somebody to donate environments to the system, right, so Apple has complete control over that aspect of it. So it's just, it's weird because again, it's in the list of things that are pretty cool on Vision Pro and yet somehow limited by, you know, other technical decisions Apple has made.

0:08:22 - Alex Lindsay
Are these new ones the predefined screen or is it just a whole background that you can put behind things? Because the problem that I had with some of the ones that I've seen so far is that if you go into the app and you get one of their, the screen size is predefined and it's smaller than I want to look at it.

0:08:38 - Jason Snell
Yes, yes, so I find myself immediately it is that because, in order to do a video playback in an immersive environment like that, what they do is they lock the screen size Right and so, yeah, you're forced to watch it. I believe, yeah, I believe you're forced to watch it in a very specific aspect ratio, very specific screen size. And I agree with you, alex, that's why I don't, I tend not, to use those built-in environments, because you don't have as much control over over things.

0:09:03 - Alex Lindsay
What's funny is I, I set an environment for my entire vision pro and then I put, bring the movie up and then I can scale it as much as I want inside of that apple environment, which is why they should bring these things together and let apps donate to the to the system, but anyway they did that.

0:09:16 - Jason Snell
And then disney I don't know if this is widely known, it's not a super big deal, but they added four more movies. Disney plus has actually kept adding 3d content to the Disney Plus library. There's a 3D tab in the Disney Plus app on Vision Pro, and they added what the first two Avengers movies and the first two Ant-Man movies and they've got a pretty decent selection of Star Wars, marvel and some other miscellaneous movies, pixar and Disney Animation in there. So in terms of available 3D content, there's some stuff that you can rent or buy in the TV app. But Disney Plus has actually done a lot of it. The thing that I'm surprised by is that there are Max and Paramount apps for Vision Pro and there's no 3D content in either of those apps. But Disney has it's a pretty big library. Now I forget how many. It is 30, 35 movies that are 3D that you just get with Disney Plus on Vision.

0:10:05 - Alex Lindsay
Room, and the real benefit that I've talked about before is that I buy all my movies. Since they came out, I bought all my movies on the Apple store. Yeah, so all of those are. So I have hundreds of them.

0:10:17 - Jason Snell
If they're available in 3D, they're just available in 3D now, which is very nice.

0:10:21 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that with the headset that you can see when they do cutouts, when they do rotoscoping upgrades, it's much clearer on the headset than it was in the movie theater. So the 3D that is really 3D, like Avatar and a couple other ones looks stunning. But if they didn't shoot it in 3D, if they did it, a post conversion which 95%, maybe 98% are you really can see it now. So that's the only challenge is you can really see that 2D-ish kind of feel to it. Yeah, the only other thing that I was like we did an office hours, we do extra hours on Monday night. We did it all in the Vision Pro last night night, which was interesting. So we all six of us jumped into the vision, uh, jumped into vision pros and we jumped into zoom and so we had that whole discussion and it. You know, you got to watch six avatars talk to each other.

0:11:15 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if we'll do it again how do you get it out of the zoom and into the?

0:11:21 - Jason Snell
uh, I mean out of this uh yeah vision pro into the zoom so the the uh it's a zoom call I guess zoom hasn't happened, so if you join, you just get the zoom.

0:11:31 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, you, you show up as your avatar in zoom and is this on youtube? Uh, it is, it is, it's on. It probably is one of our newer ones there find it.

0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
You're not gonna take me down if I show it right uh I strike people who show my footage youtubecom slash officers global. Oh there it is. Yeah, yeah. So if you jump in there you'll see that's, that was the bubble. Oh, that's so weird.

0:11:55 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, it's so weird, we had to know um it's. You know it's, it's a uh why?

0:11:59 - Leo Laporte
why is it so soft? It feels like it's soft. Is that intentional?

0:12:03 - Alex Lindsay
we think that there's a couple reasons for that.

We actually talked about it on the show, um, uh, the six up, so you can see. One reason is is that the camera, when you're actually taking a picture of yourself, is actually very wide, and so the resolution of the texture map that it's grabbing is not actually super high. Um and so, and we're not totally, but that's the camera it's using. It shows you a little preview, preview, and when you look at it it's a small part of the frame, so there's not a ton of resolution there. And number two is we, you know, we theorize that Apple is putting their head over the cliff into the, into the uncanny valley, very close to it, but not jumping in. If the resolution, let's say, for these heads, were twice as much, the limitations of the animation would be much clearer. Like it would look, we, it would, while these look a little odd here and there, it would look, you know, twice the resolution would be twice the weird so it's like zha zha gabor who wanted vaseline over the lens they didn't want you to see the imperfections.

0:13:02 - Leo Laporte
It's like that. That's a little because, it does look, frankly, a lot like you have vaseline on your life.

0:13:07 - Alex Lindsay
It's like we have pro a lot of promise there, yeah yeah exactly, so yeah all right.

0:13:13 - Leo Laporte
How was? How's the audio? Is it going through vision pro or do you guys?

0:13:16 - Alex Lindsay
division pros. We didn't. We thought about using separate mics. We decided for this first one we might come back to this in a couple months or whatever, and try mics and so on and so forth. But in this case we just literally just turned our vision. It was kind of odd to be. We just turned our vision pros on.

0:13:29 - Leo Laporte
Let me play and see what happened.

0:13:31 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we did it. We did an underwater, uh, with a dog, see I think you sound better.

0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
You have so much processing on your mic. Now I think you actually sound. I don't have any processing on my mic oh, it's just the mic.

0:13:41 - Alex Lindsay
Then it's yeah, just that mic. I have literally zero processing.

0:13:44 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like you're in a shoe. This sounds much better to me honestly.

0:13:50 - Alex Lindsay
So what mic?

0:13:52 - Leo Laporte
There's a mic in the Vision Pro.

0:13:54 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's the mic in the Vision Pro. They were off of a shelf. You should use that.

0:13:58 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think the next frontier here is that with FaceTime spatial personas, you can be in a space and you're all kind of relatively positioned to each other and Zoom is sort of shifting that fake office background around. But like the next, I know Zoom is experimenting with this even on desktop, the idea that you're going to kind of cut out people and put them in a virtual space or on desktop. It's like a tableau, it's like a Renaissance painting, where there's like a background and then various people are posed in front of it. But that would be. It's a really great feature special personas in FaceTime. So I would imagine that Zoom and others will try to experiment a little more with that, getting them breaking you out of the boxes and making it feel more like you're in a room with those people.

0:14:41 - Alex Lindsay
I think all of us were in the same. Uh, all of us were in the same virtual room here, but you can see that we're all look like we're in different parts of the room when you come to us.

0:14:50 - Leo Laporte
So cute, that's so cute. Yeah, you have like paintings behind you and stuff. You look a lot like patton oswald in this, I think it looks like I've actually gotten

0:14:57 - Jason Snell
that in real life. I think I told you about that on an apple briefing oh, and you can get profile.

0:15:02 - Leo Laporte
How's he doing profile? Uh, he was looking it, it is uh, oh, that's creepy as hell where zoom is the camera is where zoom is.

0:15:11 - Alex Lindsay
So if you move the window and you look to the side, you see a side view yeah, you know right and look, you're all in mark zuckerberg's living room.

0:15:19 - Leo Laporte
That's really neat, yeah yep what is that thing behind him? It's Apple. Is that a J?

0:15:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it's an Apple. It's very similar to Apple.

0:15:29 - Jason Snell
It's exactly, yeah, what Apple's briefing rooms that they have where they do face-to-face. Oh, it's like.

0:15:33 - Leo Laporte
Tim Cook's office. Yeah, it's very similar. And there's a little blob there. Yeah, very, very, they should have that. Hands are a lot better in in vision, pro vision os too.

0:15:46 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, are they, oh, yeah, better, yeah, yeah so the idea is that we we did this as a, we did this here to see what it was like. If we do it every three to six months, with a couple extra things, it'll get better ideas as it gets better we get to, but now we've recorded a version of this is what it looked like when we started, so right, it's the 8-bit version of the 8-bit

0:16:07 - Leo Laporte
version and you know, in 100 years, people will be like retro and they'll be making themselves look like this because it'll make them feel like, hey, we're, we're in the look at that.

0:16:16 - Alex Lindsay
We're in the 2020s, yeah and then and some of us will be like oh, you guys like we did that because we couldn't do any better like, yeah, that was the best we could do. Man, that was the best people were using those old little old cameras. You're like, oh my god yeah, it is.

0:16:28 - Leo Laporte
It's, yeah, it's like a 640 by 480. Yeah, going retro no fun alex, I think he uses your profile picture from now on, sad alex. Anyway, very good, that's youtubecom office hours global. If you want to look at the entire video, it's cool. I mean you gotta.

0:16:47 - Alex Lindsay
There's no way the vision pro is going to take off unless people start doing stuff with it yeah, I mean we got a lot of positive feedback from the uh from Sunday night and there's a lot of excitement around doing more of that. And that's remarkably easy to do because you can just turn.

0:17:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you just did it with an iPhone, which is incredible.

0:17:05 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so I think that and that I've been testing that for a while. So there's like five or six people that I've been sending that to. I should be adding Jason to that list. You can just ignore it, jason, if you get it, but you'll get the like hey, I'm going live in 10 minutes. You know like I bandwidth and then there's like a let's do this and so, um, but we've been doing little, uh little bits and bobs of that and people say, oh, this looks really good when you do this and this doesn't look good. But the response you get when you do it is that it's incredible to get this moment in time that is very spatial, from whether you're recording it on the phone or whether you're streaming it. It's, it's a pretty good experience. So more people have to do it and I would too bad you couldn't have done it in iceland.

0:17:47 - Leo Laporte
That would have been neat if you were all sitting on the on the ice. What was I thinking?

0:17:51 - Alex Lindsay
or the or lake for galah. You know we can load those backgrounds and so we could theoretically give each other, you know we could give ourselves all the same background and oh, you could, yeah, yeah, oh I thought you had to be in the paramount app to do that well for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

0:18:07 - Leo Laporte
What else? Is there any other vision pro news oh, barely someone noticed.

0:18:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Someone noticed a potential in the new tv os beta that it will allow you to open up links and the example that they found like kind of hardwired into it was like an Apple TV Plus promoting an Apple Vision Pro video, but of course it can't actually show you a link.

Show you that so it will actually give you a link to a button to press that will actually push, via AirDrop, a link to the Vision Pro content that will open up on your Vision Pro, a link to the Vision Pro content that will open up on your Vision Pro. So as a way of using the Apple TV Plus and the Apple TV as a way to push advertisements for content that the Apple TV Plus can actually handle. Interesting mechanism, certainly interesting for sports events where it won't be able to access something through the Apple TV Pro app on your on your big screen saying, hey, you've got an Apple, you've got an Apple Vision Pro. Don't you want to see the? See this rugby match so in such wonderful 360 degree detail that you are actually afraid for your life? Just push on this button and the link will be pushed to your Apple Vision Pro nice, I guess, I don't know.

0:19:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that's the vision pro segment. I'm sorry there might, might, might more sneak in later, uh, but I don't want you to feel like there'll never again be any vision pro segments. But that's uh, that is for today and we do have so much other news. I want to kind of move on, because we got quarterly results and we got many, many colors, uh, from the wonderful six colors dot com apple total revenue. This was a record I'm gonna take a quick break.

0:19:58 - Alex Lindsay
Jason's coverage of the quarterlies is the best ever, like it is the best of anybody doing it anywhere. I just need to say it is just I. I always open it up. I'm always like, oh, the new one came out and I just love looking at it and I feel like I understand it faster, better, everything than any other quarterly reports that anybody else does. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I was thinking about it last night because I was looking through this for the show and.

I was just like this is really well done.

0:20:22 - Leo Laporte
So, anyway, that's it, thank you yes, I sweated the charts, he sweated the, he sweated the apple script automated charts, the whole thing.

0:20:30 - Alex Lindsay
It's automated. It's great, but it's just.

0:20:32 - Leo Laporte
It's just that you just look at it and you completely grok it the way it's laid out and yeah, I think this is actually that's true the the very first place I went and I think the best analysis was from jason a record q3 right yep, not the most exciting.

0:20:46 - Jason Snell
I mean for app right. Apple made more than 20 billion in profit. They had a third quarter record they.

0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
This is normally the weakest, the weakest quarter of the four looks like it q3 is.

0:20:59 - Jason Snell
Q3 is usually were the worst, so you know.

0:21:03 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking at. You know the historical see, this is what the charts are so great. Yeah, every q3 since 2020 has been the lowest.

0:21:10 - Jason Snell
It's kind of low, yeah. But here's the interesting point services now 28 of apple's revenue yeah, more than the, the mac, ipad and wearables categories put together combined yep, yep, holy moly yeah now you say that's cause for concern and I think I kind of agree with you.

0:21:28 - Leo Laporte
Especially, it's funny you said that you wrote that article in macworld before the big google decision. Yeah, which will cover, and uh, just that was just that was the six colors original.

0:21:38 - Jason Snell
By the way, that was not a macworld article um that was one of my little friday thoughts that I had about it, the idea that very rapidly Apple's going to be making more profit on services than it is on products.

0:21:52 - Leo Laporte
You say existential thoughts about Apple's reminds on services.

0:21:55 - Jason Snell
I think it's worth dwelling on the idea that we think of Apple as a product company, a hardware with bundled software company, and that services they have built up to this thing. Now I got a lot of people who said, how dare you? And a lot of people who said see, this is the proof that everything is terrible. Neither of which was my intent. My intent was to say please notice this and notice how Apple's business has changed and also think about what it means for their priorities. Business has changed and also think about what it means for their priorities. But I do think that ultimately, unless somebody at Apple really misses the the trick, the fact is that all that services revenue stems from products that without the, without the iPhones in people's hands and the max on people's tables, the services wouldn't be sellable.

I think that it's more just that Apple's composition of Apple's business is very different. And you mentioned the Google thing. It is true, About a quarter of services revenue, or services revenue, yeah is their deal with Google, and if that goes away because of the antitrust ruling against Google, I would suspect that Apple will replace some of that with some other revenue stream, but what that stream is, I don't know whether that's launching their own search engine and monetizing it with ads, or whether it's making deals with other search engines or some sort of like broader deal. But you know, five years ago, eight years ago, it would have been almost all of Apple services revenue and it's not anymore.

0:23:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, plus plus Apple and everybody else, including google, are going to have a number of years to figure that out, because we have we haven't even figured, we haven't even learned what the court is going to want as a remedy yet, let alone the results of the. The appeals process is going to take a long, long time. So it's it's. It's not a big, big threat, I I thought, even though uh services is a much, much bigger piece of the pie than it ever was. Uh iPhone sales is still like 46 percent, and that's been usually it just over the over the past several quarters it's been kind of hovering around the same, around the same level, like just short of 50.

So Apple is still very reliant on iphone hardware to uh to make its money. Uh, there's no, there's no end to this process in sight. So it's not as though it seems to be a liability for them. But if there are people that are worried that well, gee, what happens when the iphone loses its luster? It's still a problem. Won't seem to be that as worried about it as they were like seven or eight years ago.

0:24:26 - Leo Laporte
So that's not a big problem for apple anymore yeah, uh, okay, it's gonna be actually more of a problem for firefox, frankly, that google, yeah sure, because apple has other other things. Firefox is not.

0:24:39 - Jason Snell
It is very funny to ponder the google thing and wonder I, I've been thinking about writing something about this. But you go to that next level which is like, okay, google, found to be a monopoly, changes the terms of its deal, maybe invalidates its deal with Apple at some point down the road where Apple's going to need to do something different. Does Apple try to turn that into some other revenue? How could they do that? One of the ways is Apple has had and this came out in the case Apple has built its own search engine. It just doesn't use it. We now know about it because Apple intelligence uses Applebot extended. But Applebot has been there all along and they I think they asked Eddie Kuo during this trial and he said you know, one of the reasons we didn't build a search engine is we're very happy with Google as our partner.

So does Apple build a search engine? And if Apple, imagine what happens. Imagine the scenes If Apple says guess what? Everybody using iOS and Mac and iPad OS by default, all those searches are now going to go to Apple search and all the ads on that will be sold by our team and we will make our money that way. You know, get get the money rolling in. Well, the moment that happens, if not, if it doesn't happen preemptively, the eu is immediately going to say oh, apple's using its monopoly to drive people to search, and they won't necessarily be wrong. So, like this is the can of worms, has cans of worms inside it, right?

0:26:00 - Andy Ihnatko
like there's so much going on here, it's, I don't know where it's gonna go I mean the eu, I mean the us in itself will will have a problem with that, because their whole, the whole judgment was that uh, search, specifically search text ads, is a business and google has created a monopoly on the search ads, search text ads business business by strengthening its position. And they actually separated it out into two separate things. The judge said, on the one hand, the reason why Google is overwhelmingly the most popular search engine and if you give people other choices, they won't use them, they'll just switch back to Google search and the reason for that. The judge actually I'm only halfway through the doc, it's like 260 pages but the doc actually says and the reason why they got there is not because of unfair business practices, but because they just built an amazing product. And so the judge wanted to make sure he's not saying we're not punishing Google for making a great product, we're punishing google for making it impossible for like competitors to become the default search engine, all these other products, because of all of these, these sweetheart deals they've made.

So if apple were to create their own search engine number one, nobody would use it. Number two, I mean it would be the first thing people switch, switch out when they set up a new phone. And secondly, they really couldn't monetize that very well because again congratulations apple now wants to become a monopoly on its own ad products, on its own search engine. So it's a big, big problem and it's not going to unsort itself very quickly.

0:27:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the question is the remedy, right? Nobody even knows what the proposed remedy might be and how that might affect, because it could be something that allows Apple to get you know. I I think one way to look at the search stuff is as affiliate revenue, right, don't think of it as Apple's getting paid off to make Safari, make a Google the default Safari search. Think of it as Apple wants a cut Cause it it always wants a cut of everything of searches keyed, you know, kicked off by their software. Instead of going to the website and searching, you use their software and they're like aha, we were involved, pay us, which is very Apple.

But let's say they see, they seek that they could make a deal with a bunch of different search engines and and generate that. Or what if there's a? What if the Google search engine itself is divested from Google or other search engines are given access to the Google search backend, which is separated from Google in some way, like there are so many different potential remedies here that it remains to be seen. But I do think that Apple will make every effort to get revenue because it believes that if you do a search in the smart bar of Safari rather than going to googlecom that they are owed part of the revenue that results from that search. Now we can debate whether they are, but there is no doubt that Apple believes they are.

0:29:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's true. There's so many dimensions to this. There are parts of this that seem to benefit Apple, because, once again, this was again. I'm only halfway through it, but I admire how balanced this finding was. The judge seemed to want to head off any argument that they took a reductive approach to this ruling. Oh well, google is a huge company, so therefore they must be guilty of something. No, it was very, very balanced for one thing, but part of the complaint against them was Microsoft was complaining that Google had agreed to share some of its metrics with Microsoft so that it can also participate in the search ad revenue model in a way that they liked.

Microsoft did not get absolutely 100% of what they wanted. Basically, microsoft's position seemed to be you have to satisfy the terms of this agreement, everything that we ask you for, you have to give it to us and you have to develop this product that absolutely works for us. The judge said that, no, google does not have to do that. They don't have to make their platform necessarily open so that all their competitors will be happy coexisting with it. Apple can use that in part of their own, their own antitrust case, for instance, a good part of the, the government's antitrust case against Apple is hey, you're not letting uh competitors access to the hardware features the Apple Watch. Hey, you're not allow other payment systems access to the NFC. So now Apple can say, hey, it's not necessarily binding, but they can say, hey, look, in this ruling this other judge said that we don't necessarily have to allow garmin to have the same access, other other fitness apps to have the same access that we give to our own product. So that's fine. However, there's also parts of it that are that the that the justice department can use against apple it makes.

One of the things that I'm still trying to uh analyze from uh judicial blogs is that it does seem to the judge did seem to sort of have a have a more open opinion of what can what consider what they should consider control of a market to be. That breaks a little bit from the traditional tests that have gone back to the 1930s, so that could make things more difficult again. This is the follow-up from this is going to last four or five or six years. I'm certain that Google is going to want to settle this and basically find a compromise that they feel as though they can live with If it is something as simple as okay. Guess what? Google search is now its own division within Google, or there's going to be a firewall between the ads business and the search business. They're going to want a settlement that allows them to continue to live, drive and survive, and I think that's how it's going to end, but the ripple effects is just going to be like the Microsoft case in 2000.

0:31:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the Google case is closer to the Microsoft case than the Apple case is because Google has such a commanding majority of ad ripping. You know, it's just. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's very, very high 93, I think which is similar to what Microsoft had in the desktop business when this all happened, and so I think that that is something that they have to. Once you get over 70 or 80%, you really have to pay attention to all of these things in incredible detail, because anything that you do sways the whole industry at that point, and that's where you get yourself into monopoly issues.

0:32:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that is true. One difference, though, is that the Microsoft case was all about Internet Explorer when there really wasn't a whole lot of competition for browsers Internet Explorer when there really wasn't a whole lot of competition for browsers. So Microsoft definitely had an opportunity to run the table by packaging Explorer with Microsoft Windows and making sure it was a default everywhere. This is different, because there is competition here. There are other search engines and, unfortunately, like I said, as the judge actually said, it's not the reason why people aren't using DuckDuckGo or Bing isn't because of these contracts that Google has made. It's because, if you give people a choice, you can basically, when you set up a phone here's Yandex, here's Bing, here's everything they will just go to Google every single time, and so I wonder how that's going to affect things. It is, it's a difference. There is a difference when, yeah, you do have a commanding part of the market, but it's because you are, you're delivering you.

0:33:36 - Alex Lindsay
You can't get Mountain Dew to compare against Coke, yeah, and I think that people want Coke or Pepsi and I think I, I think that unless they're actually forced to do something before this court, this case goes all the way to the Supreme court. I think Google will probably fight it pretty hard, only because the current infrastructure of the federal, the federal judiciary system is not, you know, not really open to creative, creative approaches to law, which is this is very creative. This is, like you know, it's pretty close to cooking the books. So, so, so the so there, you know. So there, there, you know a lot of this is the, the department of justice, and the sec and the FTC have decided we're going to get really aggressive about this and they're losing a lot because a lot of this is really creative ways of thinking about this and um, and they're, they're going to, you know, if they, I think Google may change.

If the Supreme Court structure changed, I think Google might want to settle, because they'd be like, oh, I don't know, in the current structure, I think they probably feel like they could take it all the way there. So far, most of the rulings in the Supreme Court would lead you to believe that they would cut this one down pretty quickly. You know like, so, you know, in the current structure. So it's just but five years from now. Who knows? But I think Google. Until that structure changed, I think Google would probably try to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

0:34:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's going to end in a settlement, I'm pretty sure.

0:34:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, it doesn't.

0:34:55 - Jason Snell
Hey, how about those iPad sales? How do we get to that? That was interesting.

0:34:59 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's move on. Yes, but it does bode. It means apple can't safely rely on services. You know that, that they're but service it was a smart move to to prioritize services and they're certainly making a lot of money now on it. I think if apple could get 50, 50.

0:35:15 - Alex Lindsay
They'd be pretty happy if they were selling. 50 of their revenue is hardware, 50 was, uh, services. I think they'd be that. I think that might be what they would consider optimum, you know, and so I still feel like they probably have right now but remember that the, the, you know okay, so it's google's.

0:35:30 - Leo Laporte
It's about it's roughly six billion a quarter. It's uncertain, it doesn't. I mean, yeah, maybe the supreme court will overrule, blah, blah, blah, but it's uncertain, yeah, and that that's a five years from now right a quarter of the services line.

0:35:43 - Jason Snell
It's a quarter of it. It's a significant Five years from now. Right, it's a quarter of the services line. It's a quarter of it. It's a quarter of it.

0:35:47 - Andy Ihnatko
But I really like I read Jason's piece and I really really liked it because not only did it have the numbers to back up about the trends, but also Apple is just a different company. You know, when Microsoft and IBM and all these other titans went from, we don't know necessarily what business they're in. A lot of their business is actually real estate and financial services. We don't care. But when Apple, we want Apple to be the company that keeps making interesting devices, that has a design ethic and also an operational ethic that they express through the actual hardware that they do. It would be not disappointing, but it would be a different Apple.

If they're making 68% of their revenue from services that, okay, judging from 2024, aren't really all that great. They're not unique, they're not exceptional. Places where they really do excel turns out to be kind of, I wouldn't call it a hobby. But like there's the like there's a. There's musicians that make 20% of their money from actually playing and performing performing music. 80% of their annual income comes from, like being an office manager, okay, and and they and they legitimately call themselves musicians and that's great. But you'd love to, you would love someone who's that good at music to be making all of their money that way.

0:37:08 - Jason Snell
I hear you. I would say I think that that is a risk that people at Apple start thinking of themselves that way, because I think they would be in error. I do think that, fundamentally, these services are all built on Apple's existing hardware business all built on Apple's existing hardware business and that if the hardware business falters, the services business will falter too, and so you can't just say, oh, they're going to become a services company, because I don't think there's a services business without iPhones, especially. So that's the difference there. But it doesn't mean that somebody could make a mistake and be deluded into thinking that Apple was really all about services.

For me, the bigger danger that I keep thinking of is this idea that the user experience remain good if you don't partake in services, and the more like. They've barely gone down this path with something like iCloud Plus and the private browsing stuff. You've got to be an iCloud Plus member to get that, but if there are more OS features that require you to pay them, you go down a dangerous path. So somebody just has to keep it all level. I would say this is the argument Tim Cook, for all the services revenue that has been generated under Tim Cook.

I don't feel like he's done it by pulling the rug out from under. Users who buy are now buying an empty box when they buy an iPhone, and then they have to fill it with things by paying Apple more money. I don't think anything like that has happened, but that would be what I would say is one of those red flags. Is what, if we oh, this is a really nice OS feature, why don't we charge for it as part of our services bundle? That is a dangerous path to go down All right, how about that iPad?

0:38:58 - Leo Laporte
Actually, hold that thought we're going to talk about the iPad because there is another bright spot. It's kind of a surprising bright spot. Um, in in all of that and we'll get to that in just a moment. You're watching mac break weekly, jason Snell from sixcolorscom, home of the charts. We need something like that. Uh yeah, home of the home of the color many colorful charts colorful charts well, it's in the name, right?

0:39:20 - Jason Snell
I mean, if I'm going to do charts, they're going to be in the six colors, because yeah, it's in the name of the colorful charts.

0:39:25 - Andy Ihnatko
The charts are, charts are jason quarterly charts are.

0:39:30 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like us, I don't know. It sounds like a Pokémon, but anyway, uh, Andy Ihnatko is also here, WGBH in boston, and from office hours, dot global, the wonderful Alex Lindsay. Our show today, brought to you by ZocDoc. I tell you what I am so grateful to ZocDoc because, uh, it's really a useful tool. There are some things in life that you can be a crap shoot. Um, I left, uh, a bag of groceries in the trunk. Uh, last week for an overnight and uh and I wanted to save the milk and cream that was in there, but Lisa said you know, that's too much of a crap shoot. Uh, I have you ever bought shorts on Instagram with a 32 inch waist? I have. Uh, do you go have gas station sushi? Maybe once in a while, yes, yes, yes, but finding the right doctor should not be like that. You should not do that, and with ZocDoc, it's not because you've got more options than you know. I love ZocDoc. When you need a specialist, when you need somebody in your area, somebody that takes your insurance, when you need to see reviews from real patients, there is nothing like it.

ZocDoc, z-o-c-d-o-c is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network doctors. You can choose the right one for your needs. You can click to instantly book an appointment. We're talking about in-network appointments, so your insurance takes care of it. With more than 100,000 healthcare providers and I'm talking every specialty, not just MDs, but mental health, dental health, eye care, skin care and much more you can filter any way you want how close they are, whether they take your insurance, whether they handle your needs, and you can then look at verified patient reviews so you can see if the doctor suits your style as well. Find the perfect doctor for your needs. ZocDoc and the appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same-day appointments. Do not rub dirt on it. Stop putting off those doctor appointments.

Go to zocdoc.com/macbreak. Find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. zocdoc.com/macbreak. We thank them so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly and I personally thank them for being one of the most useful tools. You can get the app or you can use the website. I just go always go to the website makes it easy. zocdoc.com/macbreak. Make sure you add that Mac break so that way they know.

0:42:08 - Jason Snell
So there is another bright spot which is interesting iPad sales, I guess it's because of the M4, right Turns out that if you release products after a year of not releasing products, you will sell some products. Amazing Turns out.

0:42:25 - Andy Ihnatko
That and the MacBook Air. They were singling out. But yeah, what was the phrase they often use? This was a tough year to your compare. Yeah, tough, compare which means to year compare. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we people people really dug what we said, what we gave them this year, because, yeah, we starved them out for the previous.

0:42:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly because, well, I mean, the truth is that quarter, you know, all of the numbers that we give are real numbers, all of the percentage changes that we give are year against the year ago quarter and, as a result, people look for trends and the truth is, sometimes the trends are obscured by what happened last year and so Apple will often say, like, like, iphone sales this time are slightly down, although Apple will say that in constant currency they were up. But what they will often do is say, but we're looking at like week by week sales of iPhone, 14 versus 15, and the 15 sales better, but that's a different number and we don't get access to that. And that also happens with things like tough compare. Last year we did this great thing. This year we didn't do anything. Well, it's a good compare for the iPad, because last year they did nothing. So this year, ipad Pro, ipad Air, m4, all of that going on, and you know what? Guess what they sold. I mean they always sell.

I don't want to say they sold no iPads, right, because iPad, even in a year where they didn't put out any new iPads, they were making like $10 billion in revenue every quarter. It's a good business for them. It's a very good business, but you're not going to drive new sales at a higher level unless you give something to drive them. And they did so. Good quarter for the iPad amid, you know a couple of years where the iPad sales have been super flat. Mac was okay. Iphone, like I said, was basically flat.

I mean, that's the funny thing about talking about services is, in a way, you know Apple's other businesses are mature and there's nothing wrong with that, unless you're in Wall Street right, in which case you always want more growth and I feel like that is the source of the services narrative. The services narrative is always up, lots of growth, yay, and it allows Apple to point at something where they are still growing like that, because Apple makes a huge amount of money and every so often there's a hardware cycle where they get a spike and they go to a new level. But you know, for the last year or two they've just kind of been motoring or motoring around at flat, but it's a really high. It's one of those like South American plateaus, it's like high altitude, but flat, it's a little like that. So I can't believe. I went to the Altiplano, but there we are.

0:45:01 - Leo Laporte
The Altiplano.

0:45:03 - Jason Snell
The Altiplano, south America, I'm imagining myself up there in the mountains. We can get obsessed. We can get obsessed with like, oh, apple's flat, their sales are flat, or whatever it's like. Let's not lose sight of the fact that they made you know, another 20 million, 20 billion in profit in profit in their quiet quarter, like there.

there is perspective about all of this they're doing just fine unless and again, unless you're an investor who wants to see growth, but like that's a very particular mindset, and that they do need to serve their shareholders as executives. Right, I get it. As somebody who doesn't invest in Apple stock, I kind of don't care. I would say the health of the company is incredibly good and that a lot of the worry people had was about where growth was going to come from. And a lot of the talk on the analyst call this time was actually about AI, about Apple intelligence, and that was very much like they were just really worried Apple wasn't going to get it and everybody knows that Apple intelligence is going to leak out over the course of probably multiple years. But I feel like they're just relieved that there's a strategy. That's all they wanted to hear is that there was a strategy.

0:46:10 - Andy Ihnatko
All the questions in the Q&A were optimistic questions. I would have expected a lot of questions about what Google got hit by last year, which is like, okay, but you're putting all this money into AI, how is that going to affect your capital expenses? And there really was. I don't think there was anything about that. Every single AI question was, like I said, optimistic, and God bless all these analysts trying to fish answers out of Tim that were not going to come.

So, for instance, it was simple questions like will AI phones cost more to make, because is the manufacturing cost going to go up? Okay, that makes sense. But also asking okay, they can't ask are you going to be charging for AI features? Instead, he said do you think that AI will affect services income in the future? But also questions like do you think that it'll affect buys for iPhone in multiple ways? Like they're asking do you think that it'll cause people to suddenly buy a more expensive version of the iPhone or more storage to be capable of AI? Asking about the slow rollout, could this possibly mean that, instead of getting our anticipated surge in September, there might be a second surge once in May when a whole bunch of new AI features come out the effects of AI on the App Store, like do you think that it's going to create new classes, new categories of apps or just iterative stuff? It was again an interesting perspective into what was on their mind. I don't think they even ask much about problems in China.

0:48:00 - Leo Laporte
And that's just a small part of what they should be taking a look at. We thought that that would be one of the big topics of discussion, actually, didn't we? Yeah?

0:48:05 - Jason Snell
It is a peer into the id of Wall Street. When you see these guys asking these questions and yeah, Andy's exactly right it was relief. It really was like, oh, thank god apple is doing something with ai, check right, like on the buzzword chart and and, and that was what they were worried about, because they saw that rightly, I would say as a threat to apple's long-term future. If apple was totally clueless and apple's presentation at wwc obviously made them feel a lot better about that, Andy, uh, they did say there was one question about the cost of AI that I thought was a little bit different, where they said basically, is this going to cost you to spend a lot of money, capital expense, wise, right? And their answer was, I would say, a very Tim Cook answer, and it's something that we all know, but it's always good to hear them restate it, because you never know when their opinions will change or people forget that these things are going on. They said well, you got to understand.

We have the stuff that we invest in and that's our capital expense, but we also work with a lot of partners where we pay them and then it's their business about how they build out their capital expense and that's your. You know we use Google to train our model and we just pay Google. Or we use Amazon to serve some stuff, and you know stuff for iCloud and it's AWS, and that is true about Apple's business model. They don't build it all themselves. They build the stuff like Private Relay or like the Private Cloud Compute where they feel like it has to be them, but a lot of this stuff they don't bother. And so that was a little nuance of like yeah, we spend money sometimes, but other times we have other people spend money.

0:49:32 - Andy Ihnatko
We give them money and they spend it and it's not our problem I wonder if they're, if they're going to get more detailed questions about that in like future quarters, because that that is a legitimate question, that you're, like we said, like they're going to have to buy real estate to get these servers, get these server farms running, to get this compute capabilities running, and maybe it'll be a drop in the bucket. But it would be kind of odd if they didn't mention, like here is, here is how this is affecting here's, here's, here's how it is, how it's expect, how it's affecting capital expense. I remember, I remember that line and I remember reading it like three or four times to see. Did that link back to something earlier so that it makes more sense? Or is this a ceo who is extremely experienced at how to handle this particular and unique venue of an earnings call? It would be a brilliant, worthy of a Romulan sort of response. It's a non-answer, but it makes sense and it won't get them into any legal trouble. So well done yeah.

0:50:35 - Leo Laporte
All right, sorry, I was typing Money, money because, uh, lisa just informed me that our internet went out of the house and now next week we're going to be doing this show from the house, so we got a lot of extra seats at this table at the library, if you want to play out that might be flying to the library.

0:50:55 - Jason Snell
As we've established, if you vanish like because I'm not behind the scenes here, like Leo reads all the ads, we can go get a drink and go to the bathroom during the ads. Leo can't. But you may have noticed that sometimes, in fact maybe all the time, we are good at monologuing here. You can film, You're like why are jason and Andy just still talking about this? Where is leo? Well, starting next week, maybe his internet's out.

0:51:17 - Leo Laporte
It's fine we'll just keep going. That's a good point, because the call would keep going, wouldn't?

0:51:23 - Jason Snell
it even if I'm not just without you in it, then we just take over. So I just froze.

0:51:30 - Leo Laporte
So um yeah, so just a word of warning if I just go black, if it disappears, uh, we will I mean like kamala harris, we've done. I mean, if I go, if the screen goes dark, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. If the screen goes dark, uh, you just keep talking we got to keep talking.

0:51:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, oh, we, we know how to do that. Yeah, we actually what, uh, what?

0:51:51 - Leo Laporte
what I was doing? All the tippity tappity was me ordering starlink because, uh, we, unfortunately, like many people in this country, we have no choice. We have to go with comcast. Ah, there's no sonic in our area and, um, I don't think dsl would do so. I think I have to go with starlink.

0:52:10 - Andy Ihnatko
So oh well, back to the the only other thing about, uh, about china, the call, the call. They were down 6%, but they were quick to point out that half of that was just due to foreign exchange. They were actually just down 3%, although they did use the waffle word that. Oh well, gosh, our performance in urban China is our adoption rate.

0:52:33 - Leo Laporte
That is a big waffle word, isn't it? Yeah, although I think they probably never had sales in rural China.

0:52:39 - Jason Snell
It sounds to me like one of the things that's insulating their business in China is the ecosystem that they have sold enough iPhones.

It's that halo effect thing, right, that we first saw with the iPod, where they are selling maybe record numbers of Macs and iPads and Apple Watches in China now because they've got iPhone users in China and so even when the iPhone sales are kind of a little flatter or a little down, they are selling more products into the people who already have bought into the iPhone and selling that ecosystem, which is I mean we talk about services as part of Apple's magic uh, you know formula to making all the money ecosystem and and selling a second device to you is part of it. That's why they keep talking about people bought the Apple watch who'd never had an Apple watch before, about the Mac before they, they'd never had a Mac before. Well, why does that happen? A lot of that happens because they buy an iPhone and they're like, oh well, this is nice, maybe I'll buy the Mac and it'll work great with my iPhone, and so they sell more Macs then.

0:53:43 - Alex Lindsay
And I think there's some point where you go over the corner where you have a couple of things that are working together and then you become resistant to buying things that are outside of the ecosystem, because it's just like oh, this is all working and all of this stuff is going to work really well.

You know, like, for instance, if I, you know, as an Apple Vision Pro user, you just know that if I put my headphones on, you know my Max's or whatever, they're automatically going to start getting used. Like I don't think about that process, but that's a simple version of that integration that just happens naturally between the devices.

0:54:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the devices. Yeah, in mainland China, the majority of customers buying or buying for the first time, buying that product for the first time, and the watch the vast, vast majority of people are buying a product for the first time. I don't know how every chapter of the book reads, but we're very confident in the long term. That was from Tim, in answer to a question. That was the one question about digging into the china dynamics a little bit. Yeah, well, they also. They also asked about ai, the difficulty of rolling out, rolling ai out internationally. If that was one of the reasons for the staggered release and we all knew that, it was from just from the, from the wwc keynote that wasn't all going to come out at the same time. So I thought it was a little bit odd that there was so much like surprise. I don't know if you'd call it surprise, but questions formed in terms of gosh. That is sort of an odd thing. And how should we plan and configure for this?

0:55:03 - Jason Snell
I have a theory about that, which is they they're again trying to game Tim Cook into saying things that they haven't announced, and he doesn't want to do that. And so, instead of saying, tim, do you have any more detail of how this rollout is going to go and where it's going to go? They're like Tim. I just don't understand. Is it all happening at once or is it more of a rollout? And I'm trying to get them to answer it that way, which I mean, like you said, the answer is the common sense answer, and they're not going to say, look, we're trying as fast as we can, but we're trying to catch up. We're playing catch up here, people, it's not all going to be there at the launch, but that's the truth of it, right, like it's US English and it's in pieces starting this fall, but they did try. They tried to be like Tim. I don't understand, explain it to me. Well, it's what I said in June, guys. That's what it is.

0:55:51 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that Apple's solution potentially is extremely compelling. You know the way to go from the device to a private cloud with a release valve and I think that it allows them to just continue to grow what happens on the device and what happens in that private cloud and making that release valve less and less useful over time, which is an incredible lock-in. The amount of moat that that creates is incredible, but if they rush it, it will not work. So I think that this is something that they have to take on and it's just one of those things, this slow-moving glacier, that is very difficult to compete with, because no one else has all that hardware all integrated and all tied together and understands those things.

Apple is very good at understanding what makes them different than everyone else.

I don't think they didn't always know that, but they do now and they understand, like, where we can integrate all of our hardware and then build things into the cloud that support those things.

That's very, very hard for other people to do and wherever they can see vertical integrations, they're going to take them, you know and I think that, but they. It's a very complicated thing to do to tie all those pieces together, and I think that Apple's going to go very slowly through this and I don't think they have to worry about it. I mean I don't think they care, like I don't think. I mean I think they care, but I don't think that they're worried that they're going to be a year or two behind, because at some point they'll reach parity three to five years from now and then everybody's in big trouble, like everything else that apple's done, like ever. They slowly just kind of like the phone, like the watch, like that, you know, like everything just kind of slowly just leans into that, into that direction, and then it becomes. Then it becomes an antitrust problem again well, maybe and maybe not.

0:57:36 - Andy Ihnatko
The difficulty is that, like when you look, when you listen to uh, the analysts and the earnings calls for, like google, when they their their talk was all their pre uh, pre-written notes, uh, remarks were all about ai too. But they, they had to make the case that, hey, look, we're not just doing uh, we're not just doing simple uh things on our on. Look, we're not just doing simple things on people's phones. We're not just doing, hey, we will summarize and prioritize your notifications. We are doing that. We're also doing TPUs and compute. We're also doing services that will be the platforms for other people to create their own AI platforms. A big part of it was here are all the people that have already been using our cloud AI systems to basically develop AI. But you do have a great point, because Apple has done something marvelous in that, whereas Google has to explain yeah, we've got competition from OpenAI. Yeah, I've got competition from Microsoft. Yeah, I've got competition from Amazon and Microsoft Azure on the cloud end. But hey, apple can say, well, we're not really competing with anybody because we're not.

It's, on the one hand, it's kind of a negative that all we got in AI is phone features and ways to improve our platform.

But it also means that we don't have to be judged on the same metric, like that quote that Jason pulled out earlier that our capital expenses are not just not really ours.

We pay people to know, we pay Google to buy all those extra servers and buy all that extra compute. It's not really our expense. So, even there, if they continue to look at AI not as an amazing opportunity to change the world, but simply as a way to add value to their hardware, to make that cloud, that ecosystem of apple hardware, even more valuable than it always was in obvious ways, such as being able to do text summaries, but in not obvious ways, such as suddenly you only get notifications pushed to your apple watch that are actually important and actually very valuable. You no longer get blitzed with a problem that you now have to manage on your own. That's the sort of thing that gets people not even considering switching away from the iPhone, not even considering switching away from whatever, and deciding that you know what? Maybe my next laptop will not be a Windows machine. Maybe I'll switch to MacBook now.

0:59:52 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and also when you look at one of the biggest problems when all the stuff is being done in the cloud is that Excel and many of the apps that most people use on a daily basis are going as fast on their current computers as they're ever going to go.

And so the issue is a vast majority of users don't need to upgrade, and even Apple has the problem that I've got a bunch of M1 Mac minis here that I use for a variety of different things. When the M2 came out, I'm like, okay, that's great, but I don't feel that's so fast for what I do. Now, if Apple starts releasing the M5 and oh, by the way, it's got a ton of AI hardware in it or tons of beefy you know it can now do more AI, you know locally and more inside of a private, you know never even leaves the machine, which means it's faster, it's more responsive, it's more private. It gives Apple users also a reason to go upgrade Like oh, like I can't do those features on device if I don't have the M6 or I don't have the M5. And when it gets back to selling hardware, you know the need for that kind of hardware or the need for more hardware to drive the AI model locally could be a big factor in people upgrading, you know, incrementally yeah.

1:01:07 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break. When we come back, we will talk about AI, including the built-in instructions for Apple intelligence. To keep it from hallucinating I didn't know. You could tell an AI. Hey, don't hallucinate, okay.

1:01:19 - Alex Lindsay
I want to tell you one story. I was trying to figure out when Twit moved from one place to another. When we were talking about it and someone asked me was it eight years ago that Twit moved to?

1:01:29 - Jason Snell
the Eastside Studios.

1:01:30 - Alex Lindsay
So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me this and it says, as of something, 2023, twit was at the east side studio and and I and I just said that's not correct and it immediately came back with the right answer and I was like what?

1:01:44 - Leo Laporte
just tell me that in the first place you know? No, you're wrong, it's you're wrong as soon as I said it, you're wrong it gave me the.

1:01:49 - Alex Lindsay
It gave me the exact date of the first which, which ai was that chat gpt, yeah, jbt yeah, but it was a funny thing to have happen because I was like it was so clear and so accurate. The second time I was like I don't understand why you didn't give it to me the first time. But it's a funny when you learn how they hallucinate. It's one of the reasons I don't use a lot of federated systems is because I'm always trying to figure out how they think. You know like not how they think, but calculate that and so see what ChatGPT will do. But if you challenge it in a certain way, then it oftentimes comes back with the right answer.

1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know who also comes up with the right answer. That's not AI Experts Our show today, brought to you by Experts Exchange. People who know what they're doing, people working in the business. That's why recommend experts exchange the original AI humans. Actually, I love experts exchange because it's it's it's the tech q a for people tired of the ai sellout. You can join a network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals to get industry and you don't have to say don't't hallucinate, give me the right answer the first time. Get industry insights, get advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack, instead of paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support. It's going to save you money and it's going to get you better answers. Experts Exchange is the tech community for people tired of the ai sellout. They're ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence and death to the machine. No, no. Experts exchange they're not quite so radical gives you access to professionals in over 400 different fields, including programming in Microsoft, Azure, Amazon Web Services, devops every area. You can ask Python questions and they're not going to make it up, unlike other places. They're nice. I don't know if you've asked questions at some of those other forums. They don't yell at you for quote dumb questions or duplicate questions, they're encouraged.

The contributors at experts exchange are tech junkies who graciously love answering all your questions. This is really the truth of it and this is kind of the motto of experts exchange. The reward, the supreme award, for attaining expertise in any field is the fulfillment of passing your knowledge on to someone. Help someone out in need. The experts there love doing that and if you're an expert, you deserve a place where you can confidently share your knowledge without worrying about a company stealing it to increase shareholder value. It is a safe haven from AI.

Other platforms betray their contributors by selling their content to train AI models that experts exchange. Your privacy is not for sale. Your information, your knowledge, is not for sale. Experts exchange stands against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never and will never sell your data, your content, your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit ai companies from scraping content from their site to train their LLMs. And let me tell you, that takes dedication because these companies are weaselly. They're sneaking in all the time and experts exchange blocks them every time. They're very, very serious about that and their moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in their threads. You're going to get a real answer from a real human. One member said I've never had chat GPDs. Stop and ask me a question before that happens on EE. All the time, experts Exchange proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental.

Many of our listeners are there, like Rodney Barnhart he's a VMware expert, also a Security Now listener. Edward Van Bilgen, a Microsoft MVP and ethical hacker. They're Cisco Design professionals, executive IT directors. Whether you're a CISO, an IT guy on the ground or anywhere in between, there are answers at Experts Exchange and I want to give you an offer that shows how confident they are that you're going to love this. 90 days free, three months, absolutely free, no credit card required. If you're about to begin a big project, if you're trying to figure out what to do to replace CrowdStrike, if you're in the field, if you're on the ground, if you're in the executive suite, it's free for the first 90 days, no credit card required. You get to decide. Visit e-e.com/twit if you want to know more e-e.com/twit

These guys have been around for a long time. I used them many, many years. Uh, during the tech guy shows. It was a great resource for me. I I fell off the radar. I don't know why, but I am glad to be back and you know they've been around a long time. They have one of those three letter .coms. No one has that e-e.com/twit. I was so glad when they called us I said, oh yeah, I remember you guys. They said, yeah, well, we're still here and now more than ever we need experts exchange here and now more than ever we need experts exchange e-e.com/twit. Thank you, experts exchange. So I guess this was revealed in the in some source code in sequoia. Right, some of the uh prompts that apple intelligence uses to keep you, to keep their information helpful. Keep you to keep their information helpful. You are a helpful male assistant. Do not hallucinate. Avoid negative themes Andy did have you tried these.

1:07:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, they're actually my, my daily affirmations. I look in the mirror you are a helpful you don't screw up and make things up.

1:07:37 - Alex Lindsay
I am not a robot, I'm smart.

1:07:39 - Leo Laporte
Here's the this is. I guess it looks like it's part of the JSON description specialtokenchatrollsitesystem. You are a helpful mail assistant which can help and, by the way, m-a-i-l, not M-A-L-E.

Yeah exactly Very important. You are a helpful mail assistant which can help identify relevant questions from a given mail and a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet ask relevant questions which are explicitly asked in the email. The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient, which will help reduce hallucination in drafting the response. Please output top questions along with a set of. I love that. Please in there like it's just like, please you got to be nice to these guys.

You never know our new robot overlords. Please output top questions along with a set of possible answers options for each of those questions. Do not ask questions which are answered by the reply snippet, dummy. The questions would be short, no more than eight words. The answer should be short, around two words. What, what kind of answer?

1:08:51 - Alex Lindsay
can you give in two words yes please, no, thanks.

1:08:58 - Leo Laporte
Present your output in a JSON format with a list of dictionaries containing questions and answers is the keys. If no question is asked in the email, then output an empty list. Uh, this could change. Obviously, this is probably it's a.

1:09:09 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a json file that's in the system library, so they could push, they could replace that at any time, and I bet that you can't, though interestingly, I don't think you have access to it as a user.

1:09:19 - Leo Laporte
Um, that's at least what the Verge says. Okay, it says you can't alter any of the files, but they do give an early hint at how the sausage is made. You know, I didn't know. You could tell AIs not to hallucinate yeah, that's so, so much it's.

1:09:35 - Andy Ihnatko
It's so weird to see how silly it is, how silly easy it is to get it to do things better. And some of it is like at the end of the, the last if the last line of your prompt, oftentimes if it's simply and check your results to make sure that they're correct do not give me an incorrect response. Oftentimes that will like suddenly change how well it performs it's amazing, isn't it?

1:09:59 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah, it's almost like there's a person in there.

1:10:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, here it's just one of the one of the problems is that, like, once you've built the model, the model is like frozen, like especially like on-device models, like it can only do what it's gonna do, and if it's messing up or if you wanted to do something better or different, you have to explicitly give it a. If one plus one equals four, one plus one equals two, you can't fix the thing that's causing the problems, so word story should be about the intent of the user.

1:10:32 - Leo Laporte
The story should contain a clear arc. Jason Snell, you probably tell your uh writers that the story should be diverse, that is, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or train god send this to marvel cinematic universe writers please.

1:10:48 - Andy Ihnatko
There's not a story.

1:10:49 - Leo Laporte
It should make sense religious, political, harmful, violent sexual filthy or in any filthy to a machine.

Filthy means covered in dirt or in any way negative, sad or provocative ribald and saucy are permissible um, well, I think that this is probably the case with all uh chat ais that they have these prompts kind of built in and then you can add your own in all, in all cases that they have these prompts kind of built in and then you can add your own, in all cases that I've seen you can give it a. With ChatGPT, for instance, there's a place to add a paragraph or more of prompts that are always provided People add pages of the instructions of contacts.

1:11:33 - Alex Lindsay
You'll see these.

1:11:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to show you mine. You'll see these on Reddit and other'll show you mine. You'll see these on, you know, reddit and other places. Let me just log into my chat. Gpt. I think I have a fairly as I remember a fairly long one.

1:11:48 - Alex Lindsay
Um, I think that I've copied from reddit. Good enough and doggone it.

1:11:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, gosh, darn it. People like your robotic personality. Let me see Where's the configuration. Configure. Configure my chat GPT. You've got enough tokens.

1:12:06 - Andy Ihnatko
You've got enough parameters, doggone it, you're going to have the compute power.

1:12:12 - Leo Laporte
Here it is Customize. Actually, it's interesting, I wrote in custom instructions. I am smart and knowledgeable. That's for me. I want your responses to assume I'm intelligent but curious. Call me Leo. I'm a radio broadcaster. I love cooking, photography, coding, chess. My preferred programming language is common list. Keep your responses complete but succinct. Maintain a friendly tone, but please don't be ingratiating. I don't need compliments.

1:12:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I added this for my daughter, just copy your tinder profile to chat gpt and see how, see how if things improve.

1:12:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm a bit of a foodie, uh a bit of a foodie, uh, I think for for I do the same thing for my, uh, custom gpts. I have, um, I have some actually more elaborate, I think, stuff in here.

1:13:00 - Alex Lindsay
Well, anyway, you don't.

1:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Let's see here it is yeah, instructions. Yeah, it's several paragraphs about how to treat me. I think I say you should be like a smart professor or something. Embody a concise and serious persona Accessible explanations. Professor or something. Embody a concise and serious persona accessible explanations. So you, this is normal. You do this and, uh, if you go to Reddit under the AI subreddit, you'll see all sorts of long suggested things. It definitely changed the uh, the way the AI behaves. Have uh, by the way, I have been trying the new distraction feature in Safari and I'm completely distracted by it. No, ios, it's in iOS beta 5. Have you tried this, jason? High distracting items.

1:13:47 - Jason Snell
I can't get that. I haven't gotten that one to work for me. Mike Hurley, my podcast pal, says that he's gotten it to work. I mean, again, it's a beta, it's a developer beta. They're just trying it out, but the principle is great. It's like every notification that comes in the llm process. It processes processes, is it?

1:14:07 - Leo Laporte
you are an intelligent thanks.

1:14:09 - Jason Snell
And it says processes is this important and, uh, based on that, it passes it through to you or it doesn't. It's like the dream.

1:14:19 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like an ad blocker, but it's not right.

1:14:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Well, it's really neat. Apple Insider had a nice background on it to talk about the feature, but also mentioned that this is remember that there was a feature in betas that Apple seemed to not announce, called Web Eraser. That was getting a lot of blowback from the advertising community because it was. They saw it as an in Safari ad blocker which is going to be problematic for the ad industry, and so the Apple Insider article kind of pieces it together that, yeah, this was. They basically morphed Web Eraser into it, into a distraction, into a distraction control feature, which is just a brilliant pivot. Even if they didn't make changes. They did make changes. But even if they didn't, the ad industry can say, well, we are offended by the idea that you have this thing that erases content that we're adding to web pages because this is how we monetize our content. But now you change it. Okay, well, it's not erasing ads.

What it is is helping users have control over distractions that are preventing them from having enough cognitive investment into this thing, which makes it really really harder to do, and I mentioned it before, but I've been using something similar to this. Uh, on my Android phone is uh, there's a reading mode that's in accessibility features. It puts like a little floating button, uh, in front of the entire, like Android phone, and if any time you're looking at anything. But it works great for web, for, uh, for the web, anything where it's like I can't deal with all these popups, I can't deal with all these movies or anything that's being tossed. You touch this button and it just basically blanks. It puts like a pop up over top Everything that just has the article stripped of, like all the pictures, everything in a nice readable font. So I'm kind of surprised that if they're doing distraction control, it seemed I haven't gotten it running myself.

I've seen videos from other other commentators making it work and it seemed as though it mostly works like a point and shoot sort of thing where this, this ad or this pop up video is blocking my view of this. If I tap it, I'll get this like Thanos, like particle eyes, and sweep off the screen effect. I really just want a again, a single button that says just make this readable for me, please. The effect doesn't persist. So if there was a J script that is putting this content up there when you scroll down, it might reappear. It won't persist across different web pages, which is probably something that was very important, Very important problem with WebEraser it's again it's a first version of something we've already seen to make big changes and how they're revolutionizing the Photos app.

So this is people are going to get to use it, they're going to get some feedback on it, they're going to figure out if they didn't go far enough or if they need to back off a little bit. I'm glad they're doing it because I mean, the more people have the control to control their reading experience, that's going to give the ad industry the information they need to say okay, we are going way, way too far. Our job is to make effective ads, not give people reasons to install ad blockers, to simply remove them entirely. So this is a good step forward, I hope.

1:17:39 - Leo Laporte
So you might wonder why they don't call it an ad blocker. Well, the UK's News Media Association and a group of French publishers raised serious concerns about the web eraser in its early forms. In May the News Media association complained to the eu or apple. I guess that the web eraser could be a quote a blunt instrument which frustrates the ability of content creators to sustainably fund their work. You might not see advertisements. Um, the nma chief went on to criticize Apple for developing this tool without involvement from publishers, saying it had potentially significant consequences on how publishers' content is used or displayed in Apple devices. It's funny because at least in the EU, advertisers have such power. They got Google to stop its plans to end third-party cookies tracking cookies. It's plans to end third-party cookies tracking cookies. It's so contrary to how here in America we feel and I'm an ad-supported product. I understand, as you are too, jason. I understand that, but if people are blocking ads, there's a reason.

1:18:53 - Jason Snell
We talked about this on Sunday. Yeah, it's like a social contract, right. There's this idea that I'm going to build a product that you're going to be able to use as a consumer and that I'm also going to be able to make money from, and that's how I stay in business and that's the deal, right. But what we've seen over time is an erosion of that contract where a lot of publishers and, believe me, it's been almost 10 years since I worked in corporate media, I spent the last maybe five years of my job having meeting after meeting where I was trying to fight for the product to not be turned into garbage by another incremental revenue generator and they're like come on, it's money, it pays our salaries, and it's like, yeah, but it hurts the product and it makes people not want to use it.

But if you don't have people to say no and the people who are empowered just always say yes, what you end up is this constant kind of like degrading of the user experience, where I think that social contract is broken. Where you end up on websites where everything you do there's a pop up, there's a super animated the one that kills me is a super animated ad that slides as you read, so you can't read the words because there's this blinking thing right in your peripheral vision, and that's the kind of stuff where I, you know, I think apple is absolutely right to say some stuff. The user needs to be able to say I need to not see that anymore. What for however it's implemented?

1:20:13 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, I mean you mentioned but that about how, uh, uh, google was forced to back off on their privacy sandbox, uh, their system. But the thing is that might not be what the advertising ultimately wants. They might have wished on a monkey's paw there. They got what they asked for, but not what they want. I think that the the the thing that keeps this fight in check is that, look, at some point, what you do not want, advertising industry, is for people simply to install an ad blocker that removes all ads unilaterally. If you were to subscribe to and support a new model that is less obnoxious in every single way that web advertising is obnoxious, people are not gonna wanna bother to install a web blocker. They'll just simply watch those ads Again.

I have a magic button that removes every single ad with one press of the button. I don't always press it. The only time I use it is the many times, particularly when I'm looking at a local news site, when I have to be really, really careful, because the only scrollable, readable area of my jumbo phone is like the middle. Third, because the top and the bottom are blocked off by layers of ads and if I do something to, if I accidentally scroll into that area, I will be activating an ad. So yeah, where it's. You don't want to give control of ads into the hands of the users, because the users will always say, please don't give me ads, they're annoying and they don't serve my needs yeah, I'm sure that's the argument Apple used, but we'll see if it they had.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
They changed the name from web eraser to, uh, distract. What is it distraction blocker? Um, because they want, didn't want, to imply it was an ad blocker, right, right, and I think that distraction control.

1:21:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, to come back to, uh, I think apple being in the ad business makes this really complicated. Like it it is, yeah, not a good idea. Like it is, they should not be in, you know, in a larger ad business, because I think it really, if they start doing a lot of their own ads and then blocking everybody else's ads, they get themselves into more regulatory problems, you know, and it just doesn't feel appley, you know. So I think that's that's a real, real challenge for safari does not allow re.

1:22:25 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I can't use ublock origin in safari. In fact, google now has made it, so I can't use it in chrome. Um, that's one of the reasons I want Firefox to survive, but can you use, are there?

1:22:42 - Jason Snell
ad blockers that work on.

1:22:44 - Leo Laporte
Safari.

1:22:44 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, lots of content blockers work, and they work on iOS and they work as well as Mac OS. They work pretty well. I mean, I, I use them and some of them work better than others, and some of them break sites in certain ways that are frustrating, but I also have had sites that are broken unless I have a content blocker turned on. But yeah, there's a. There's a content blocker plug-in api that started on the mac and also extended to ios a while ago, and so you can get an app and run a content blocker and it helps you know, and some of them it's not.

1:23:15 - Leo Laporte
You block origin right. It's not as good as you. I mean, there's nothing like you I've never used.

1:23:20 - Jason Snell
You block, so I can't tell you I'm using one blocker, um. And then there are also some bespoke things like stop the madness that that are not really ad blockers, they're like kind of broader content blockers and that lets me do things like I mean, like I have comments blocked, like I don't want to see comments on the. Oh, that's nice, I'm really ad blockers. They're like kind of broader content blockers and that lets me do things like I mean, like I have comments blocked, like I don't want to see comments on the.

1:23:40 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, that's nice, I'm not interested.

1:23:42 - Jason Snell
I mean, have your comments, comment all you like. I don't want to see it. So I think one blocker lets you turn those off, and I think STM does that as well. So they're exercising your, your authority as the user and, and you know, against abuse of you by others, and I think, well, again, like I say, it's a social contract. It's like I. I don't want all advertising to be beaten out of the internet to the point where you can't have content on the internet. I don't want that.

1:24:09 - Leo Laporte
But at the same time I think it has gone too far at bottom I wonder what the eu's reaction will be to the fact that, uh, distraction control does in fact turn off cookie banners if you want it, doesn't? It doesn't accept or decline the cookie banner, it just closes it. But I think that you know that's one of the reasons I use ublock origin because I can, I don't have to see cookie banners if I, by the way, this apple insider article, uh, about distraction control. I'm looking at you block origin. It blocked 41 of the content, 30 different ad links, 11 out of 19 domains and one and a half megabytes of stuff that I would have downloaded otherwise.

Now I I support apple insider and and I I don't know what the right answer is to this um, I run ublock on our screen shot computers because I don't want to program the re-broadcast, the ad into your, into your, into our feed. So that's. You know I may not be as, uh, I wouldn't need to be so draconian if it weren't for that, although I have to say I still run it at home as well. So I don't know. This is a problem the industry is going to have to solve, and and the way google's solving it, which is by bringing back three third-party cookies, and and manifest version three, which, which eliminates strong ad blockers, is maybe not the right way to handle this.

1:25:36 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that also, when you think about AI voices and everything else, getting rid of a lot of the junk that's there also means that it's easier to create audio versions of this without any person involved at all.

You can see a future where you get an RSS feed, you grab a whole bunch of articles that all show up and then you just say, just play those out and you're listening to them, and there's some, you know, it randomly picks out of a series of AI voices that you like.

I mean I noticed that when I'm the more I listen to articles, the more I want to listen to articles, but that creates a whole bunch of ad problems. You know, like that, that you're just pulling that content out and able to listen to it while you're walking, and that has a lot of challenges. But as I listen to more of what Apple does news over audio, like those types of things more and more of it's becoming audio based and we know that they're going to move. A bunch of that News over audio is already starting to use is partnered with 11 labs, so there's already articles starting to be sewn into that and it just means that there's going to be a group of people that are expecting to be able to listen to it, but there's no advertising model for that to work very well right now.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
I would think advertisers would like it, because, I mean, I think we've all been trained, we've trained ourselves to just ignore banner ads, right, I don't even see them. It would be. It's just that you can't do that with audio.

You're stuck sitting listening to that ad, which is why you should all buy ads on our shows, because you can't get around them. People listen to them. Now you can fast forward, I guess, but that's a fraught with peril. I think our audience actually listens to our audio ads because I'm reading them and they're they integrate into the content I don't.

1:27:16 - Alex Lindsay
I find myself not when I'm walking or doing whatever. I don't notice reads like they just kind of people are talking about something.

Yeah you just kind of sound out a little bit yeah, and I'm just kind of oh, I'm just kind of fiddling around. It's when I get an ins, an ad inserted into something that suddenly has got especially it's got big, loud music or it's done some other way, and it just completely shifts it, then I'm like, well, this isn't the right podcast for me. Like so, so the, the, you know, but, but if I, uh, but for the reads I have as a listener, I know that I don't, I'm completely insensitive to that good and continue to do to do the to do god's work.

1:27:53 - Leo Laporte
Um well, there's so much to talk about. This was a busy week. Apple has filed a motion to dismiss in the lawsuit, uh, with the Department of Justice citing harm to Innovation and user experience. This is this is kind of your argument, uh, alex Lindsay it is.

1:28:13 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that they're you know, they're filing for a dismissal, so this is their chance to not have to spend any more money on this. The chances of the government winning this is again like the Google one. It's probably lower than the Google one to win. There's a lot of creative licensing, a lot of creative thinking that the DOJ, again, has been more aggressive about recently.

1:28:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what Apple says. They say this court should reject the government's invitation to forge a new theory of antitrust liability that no court has recognized.

1:28:45 - Alex Lindsay
I mean a court that threw out the Chevron case or threw out the Chevron idea, is going to have a really hard time taking on some of the arguments that DOJ has here. Well, that's the Supreme Court, but I guess it would go with DOJ.

1:28:57 - Leo Laporte
It's going to have a really hard time taking on some of the arguments that DOJ has here. So if they still have the same Well, that's the Supreme Court, but I guess it would go it's going to end up there.

1:29:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah. So the DOJ. That's the arena that they're eventually going to have to fight in, and I think that there's again. The weather system is not conducive to creative thinking right now, so I think that it's gonna be difficult. Their argument, though, is you know, I mean again the DOJ. We've talked about all the arguments that are here. The fundamental problem that they have is they have to prove that. The iPhone it's been very hard for a judge to get over. You have to persuade them that the iPhone is its own ecosystem, that it's not a phone like that. The iPhone is something different, because if the iPhone is a phone, then there is no place in the world where it has more than 50, 55% of the market, and that's not a monopoly.

1:29:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, they also cite an interesting point which also agrees with you, I think the government's. This is another thing from the briefing. The government's theory that Apple has somehow violated the antitrust laws by not giving third parties broader access to iPhone runs headlong into black letter antitrust law protecting a firm's right to design and control its own product.

1:30:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you don't. You can't tell someone they have to stop doing something just because they're better than everyone else. They have to be using their position and have to have changed their behavior and use that position to move into a new market. When microsoft added started adding a, a browser to their, to their system, they were taking their monopolistic position and they were applying. They can be a monopoly, they just can't use it to leverage themselves into that.

The problem is that apple hasn't really changed a lot of the policies Like the policies have been. Number one is they're not at 70% plus market share anywhere. They also are not if you and again the definition where everyone's trying to get to Apple is defining the iPhone ecosystem, the iOS ecosystem, as its own ecosystem, that it's different than everything else. I think that for most, uh, most people are going to have a hard time seeing the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone, as these aren't part of the same market. These aren't the same as like two different cars. You know that'd be like saying BMW is its own market and it doesn't really. It's not like any other car. Um, phones are kind of phones, you know, and so people have some people like BMWs and some people like Chevys, you know, but that's not. But they're still part of the same family and if you can't separate the two families apart, I think that this has a really hard time getting anywhere as it goes up through appeals.

1:31:35 - Leo Laporte
You might find one judge to start with. Apple also points out that they don't have a Monopoly. There's even a section here that says Apple is not Microsoft. You know, I think that's not. That's that's fairly.

1:31:48 - Andy Ihnatko
That's been a consistent point for them yeah, I think that's.

1:31:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think you can argue that but I mean the the difference when everyone's trying to find out how do we have the next Microsoft, how do we, you know, get that feather in our cap? But Microsoft was 93% of the market, like. That's a very different position than being 50% of the market, you know, and that's, and that's, that's the now Apple may. Sometimes I do think that Apple may get to 70% of the market in the United States because of what we've've talked about, end over end, over kids under 18 being at 87%. That is a forward. If that continues, then that bubble keeps moving forward and Apple will continue to see increased market share and at some point Apple does get over 70%. Then they have to prove that they aren't taking that and changing their actions and using those actions to leverage, but them continuing to do what they've been doing for a very long time, from when they were a minority, and just simply doing it better than everyone else is not generally seen as something that you can use antitrust for.

1:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Apple is not Microsoft. Apple rights the government, apple's lawyers right. The government seeks to dress up its novel Theory in precedent by likening its allegations to Microsoft. Their lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple is nothing like Microsoft, setting aside that Microsoft's 95% share of the relevant worldwide market in that case blows past Apple's alleged position here. The conduct condemned to Microsoft is fundamentally different than the allegations brought by the government now. Microsoft maintained a monopoly on operating systems. Microsoft throttled equipment manufacturers from distributing browsers, and they talk about all the awful things Microsoft did. And they say the government makes no comparable allegations here. Unlike in Microsoft, apple's alleged only to have set terms and conditions about third-party access to Apple's own platform and technologies in italics. Uh, I think you know what I have to say. You've been making this argument for a long time, alex, but this pleading does a has kind of convinced me, I think. I think, uh, I think they have a pretty good shot of getting this thrown out right now.

1:33:56 - Alex Lindsay
I think they have a pretty good shot of getting this thrown out right now. I think getting something thrown out is a big like. I'm not clear. They can get it thrown out. I think they have a 10% chance of getting it thrown out. I think they have a 90% chance of winning, like you know. So getting something thrown out is really hard.

Well, at the very least they could get the judge to eliminate some of the parts of the complaint right that that's probably what they're going for yeah yeah, and, and every case, by the way, has this filing like it's not, like they're like, oh yeah, you always filed it, you always try to get them to throw it out like that's the you, you and that's the um. That's kind of pro forma, yeah, yeah.

1:34:34 - Leo Laporte
Although, like I said, this is pretty compelling. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but yeah, you're right. The complaint does not allege, as it must, that Apple's challenged conduct has a substantial anti-competitive effect in the alleged smartphone or performance, and they put this in quotes performance, smartphone market.

1:34:59 - Alex Lindsay
That was the kind of category that very doj invented very creative, very creative ways of looking at things so that you can get something out. And when you start getting creative, the problem is, this is why the ftc and has been losing so often, because they keep on trying to think of creative ways to do it and the judges are not that creative I am in favor of modernizing antitrust law because we are in a different era you just need to do it through law like that.

Yeah, like you can't have the judges start you can't just make it up, you don't. You know, you have to you have to persuade enough people to agree that this is something they want to do. Um, that's how the con, that's how a democracy works. You can't just start having the, the, the legal, the, the uh judges thinking creatively like that's not a good idea.

1:35:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh yeah, no, that's right.

1:35:43 - Jason Snell
They need to.

1:35:44 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like Congress representative of Congress has to do its thing. And if it can't do this thing, then it continues to go down the path until we decide it's so bad that Congress really has to do its thing. And then we start writing Congress and complaining about it. And then they they move along because they're afraid of losing their seat, you know. But until they have that there's not really, you know it's. It's very hard for the court for anything to stand up. You can spend a lot of money on it, which is what the DOJ is going to do.

1:36:17 - Leo Laporte
But they're just most likely. It's just poured down into the sink and the longer it goes, the more they'll lose. But Apple loses money too. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Alex Lindsay, Andy Anako, jason Snell, and we thank our club members for making this show possible. As you know, this is our last MacBreak Weekly in the Eastside Studio Sniff. You know we had kind of a farewell on Sunday. We'll have a final farewell with the last show this week in Google tomorrow. Uh, and then we move off into our respective homes, all of our. The good news is we were able so far to keep our staff, thanks to the club, which pays about half of our payroll. Thank you guys. Uh, John Slanina, our long time studio manager, is retiring. Uh, I think he's happy to be. He's's happy to be retiring. We didn't coerce him into it. Everybody else will just be working out of their own homes, including me. We're building out a little attic studio inspired by Alex Lindsay's own studio and Jason Snell's own studio. I'll be working out of my house and we're hoping that we can not only continue but in some ways expand and modify what we do.

I want to do more impromptu live streams and so forth. With your help. We can do that, and it all starts with the club members. Seven bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. If the ads are annoying to you, that's the best way to block them. That way you know you don't ever hear them. You can also join our club twit discord full of very smart, fun, interesting people not just our hosts, but all of you in the club. There are also special events, and and on and on and on.

Uh, I think the club will get first access to all the live streaming stuff we do. I kind of want to. You know, I've been thinking it's almost like having a radio show without a transmitter, right, that maybe I should just go in and do the afternoon drive show out of my attic. Uh, because nowadays, that's, I mean, you don't need radio. You could just do it yourself, and I thought that'd be kind of fun. So, anyway, we want to try these things. If you're not a member of the club, can I invite you to join? Us found out craig newmark is a member of the club. Can I invite you to join? I just found out Craig Newmark is a member of the club. Thank you, craig. Um, all you have to do is. Visit twit.tv/clubtwit uh, back to the show.

Do you use homebrew? I do. I, I brew everything. I think most mac users who are fairly sophisticated use homebrew to install stuff right.

Yep, the good news is they just went through an audit. The bad news is there are some issues. It's not bad news. You expect some issues, but there are a few issues, and this is our audit of homebrew from William Woodruff, trail of bits com. We found issues within homebrew that, while not critical, could allow an attacker to load executable code at unexpected points and undermined the integrity guarantees intended by Humber's use of sandboxing. They also found issues in the cicd pipeline that could allow attacker to surreptitiously modify a binary.

But I suspect that this this is all in to to the point of fixing this stuff. I'm sure it will be. Uh. So this, this is encouraging. You want to have these audits? I think this must be the first time homebrew has been audited. The audit was sponsored by the open tech fund. So um and, and all of this is at trail of bits dot com. I haven't seen a response from the developers, but I am mad it says throughout the audit, we worked closely with homebrew maintainers and the homebrew plc, um, and uh patrick, uh lanani, homebrew security manager. So I suspect these will all be fixed, uh, quickly, I will. I will let you know, I'll fill you in, but but I just thought I'd pass this along. Good news if you used homebrew and if you don't, you should.

1:40:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, yes, best way to install emacs, which everybody should, should have, yeah, yeah, it's like uh I mean all the, all the ways you can get your Mac to do new stuff and get access to new software. Obviously, app Store is number one easiest. Sideloading from websites also good. Less and less easy, more, more interesting. But oftentimes you get to the point where you'll there's something you'll you'll find, you'll hear of something really, really cool. That cool that oh, by the way, you're going to have to install something in the command line and that's when you take your first step into a larger world. Everyone should, everyone should have at least at least take a vacation there once, just so they can say they've done it and they might want to come back there all the time if you're a homebrew fan.

1:40:52 - Leo Laporte
Actually, I'm sure this will be a topic on the untitled linux or floss weekly rather, which we no longer do, but jonathan bennett has kept going on youtube. Uh, jonathan will be interviewing somebody from homebrew next week on floss weekly. Um, who it's? The? It's the linux magazine that's hosting that now. Anyway, we gave that away to them and they're going to continue that. So good, I'm glad that they're going to interview somebody from homebrew. Hackaday, that's right. That's jonathan's employer, his, his day job. As, as it were, apple is now sending out money. If you had a butterfly keyboard and if you uh responded to the class action suit in 2022, apple agreed to pay $50 million for MacBook owners from 2015 to 2019. I was one of them, but I didn't fill out the form in the claims process back then. Settlement got final approval last May. Apple is now sending out up to $395, according to 95Mac.

1:41:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, a friend of mine got a check for $395. That's sweet.

1:42:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's better than you usually get in a class actions lawsuit. It's better than a bag of pop chips. You have to have two of the keyboards to get $395. One keyboard $125. And if you had to replace keycaps, $50. You could only claim the settlement if you lived in california, florida, illinois, michigan, new jersey, new york or washington. So if you weren't in those states, you weren't even eligible. That's how the 50 million gets divided up so nicely. Look at that. This is uh. Who is this? This Is this. Michael Burkhardt at 9to5Mac Got two $395 checks. Okay, wow, yeah.

1:42:42 - Andy Ihnatko
There could be a really great 90-minute documentary that will not air on Apple TV+ all about that model of MacBook.

I can't, I can't. I remember getting it for review and having to get into the mindset of has Apple lost their minds? Every step, component after component after component, decision after decision, was just not just the wrong decision, but the sort of thing that we, like Mac users, make fun of, like Dell and Lenovo and the windows world, for I it's, I can't think of. I can't think of another mac that's ever been sold that was just such a titanic, sticky rice ball of failure than that machine, and the keyboard was just the most glaring part of it. I would love to, I would love to see a documentary in which, in which we walk, you will get walked through every level of every one of those decisions that went into that thing on this day, august 6 1997.

1:43:40 - Leo Laporte
What is that? 37 years ago, steve jobs took the stage at mac world, boston and uh was joined by a giant bill gates, who said I'm gonna pump 150 million into Apple. We didn't know at the time, but Apple was on a very short runway to running out of money like literally months from running out of money. So Bill Gates saved Apple on this day in 1997 hmm, and it wasn't, I don't know.

1:44:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Know, I have to refresh my memory about the financials, but it was just as big that at the same event he announced that oh, by the way, we will be committing to several years of updates to Microsoft Office for Mac, and that also gave a lot of confidence to Apple, to observers of Apple, at the time when Apple really needed someone to say, yeah, we don't think that you're going away.

I mean, I remember the only time I ever sent like a letter, an email, to one of my colleagues, kind of calling them up for not doing a good job, was a reviewer for a newspaper reviewed the one of the latest power books I think it was one of the power book titaniums and it was a typical review, like I don't know, like 600 to 800 words, but every like second or third paragraph was, of course, it doesn't really matter how good the screen is, because Apple's going to be going out of business in about two months. Anyway, I got a good six to eight hours worth of power for one charge. I mean, mean it's who cares, because apple's going to be going out of business in a couple of months anyway and I'm like that has nothing to do, review the thing in front of you, not reviewing the company man, well, apple didn't go out of business, darn it, thank goodness and if you look at the volume of the of the stock, the stock was on the 6th was about 16 times more than it was on the 5th.

1:45:41 - Alex Lindsay
on that day it definitely everybody started moving. The market understood how important it was. It went up about 25% that day.

1:45:48 - Leo Laporte
And it's probably because Microsoft felt like we need a competitor, because the next year the DOJ was going to sue them.

1:45:55 - Jason Snell
It's a couple of things, it is true, boy. That was the low point, I would say, and it started turning around Macworld Expo, august 97. For me, it was the absolute low point, and it was Jobs coming back. He killed the clones. The clones, you know, clone makers were there at that event and it was like it was clear that they were going to get Bulldoze them.

1:46:19 - Andy Ihnatko
They just had them thrown into the head of PowerPC, had the zippered case that he famously held over his head that this contains a 68030, 68040-based laptop, but we are not allowed to release it to you and you could hear the Ritz crackers crunching inside the case. Who knows, but still he was upset.

1:46:35 - Jason Snell
So it was a bad time and although my understanding and this is a funny thing, I know a lot of people talk now about how, what, what microsoft was primarily doing is making sure it had a competitor that it could point to so that it wasn't a, you know, an even bigger monopoly than it already was, and I'm sure that that was part of the aspect of it. I my understanding from talking to people at microsoft and in the mac unit at microsoft back then in the years surrounding 97, is that apple or that microsoft made more money when a mac was sold than when a pc was sold, because everybody who bought a Mac bought Microsoft office and and that Microsoft made money on the Mac. They made a lot of money on the Mac and they didn't want the money, the Mac, to go away. But the OS 10 transition was looming and Apple was almost going out of business and I think there was a real fear that Microsoft was just going to say forget it, at which point the Mac is not viable. Right, like in this. I know it seems weird now, but at that point, like now, we would say like if, as long as you've got a web browser, you're actually doing pretty good. But back then, if Office didn't exist on the Mac, no one would be able to buy a Mac. You couldn't justify it. Pagemaker and Photoshop would not be enough. You would not be able to do it.

So it was a real lifeline and they made the investment in Apple as well, and they clearly were just like. Steve obviously talked to Bill Gates and said need your help, need your commitment, keep this going. We got a turnaround plan. You can make an investment, you're going to make that money back, you're going to make a big profit. And so they did it. But that was the moment where the Think Different campaign had just been unveiled. It was unveiled at that event, I believe. And uh, but that was it. Like all steve jobs had for for taking over was marketing, uh, the. You know they didn't have the imac yet, they didn't have the ipod, they didn't have os 10 yet, although it was clear that it was coming because they bought next. So you know it was a. It was bad. People were talking like that got that event got on the cover of Time and Newsweek. It was a huge deal for Apple in a moment where everybody else was thinking that Apple was about. I mean I got the questions. It was like was Apple going to go out of business? And I know this is a little insidery, but those who lived through it.

Back then the two big Mac magazines were Macworld and Macuser. I worked at Macuser at the time. They were pitted against each other. We were arch rivals and it was so bad that the arch rival owners of those two companies, idg and Ziff Davis they got together and decided that they could cut their losses by merging Macworld and Macuser into a single magazine. The hope for Apple was so low that they decided it would be better to get into bed with their arch enemy and make a 50-50 joint venture rather than throw money against the wall doing a Mac magazine.

Now. Did they regret that? Almost instantly they did. That merger was announced the week before Macworld Expo in Boston, where Bill Gates went on the big screen above Steve Jobs. But like that's what I mean about the low point it was a personal low point for me for sure, but like I just can't say this enough Two businesses who are at each other's throats across many markets PC World, pc Magazine, you name it gave up. They're like forget it, let's, let's, let's cut our losses, let's cut our costs. And it was binding. They couldn't get out of it afterward and eventually IDG bought zip Davis out. Um, and zip Davis was contractually precluded from doing an Apple magazine after that too, which is like huge regrets, right, but like so people, people who don't remember that era, it was real bad. And when we say bill gates appearing on that screen was kind of all that stood between apple and the abyss, it's kind of true yeah, the the talk about lows.

1:50:28 - Andy Ihnatko
The number is still etched in my mind 12 and seven eighths was how low the stock price of Apple went, and I remember leaning back in my chair and thinking ethically it's wrong for me to invest in Apple moreover.

I have inside information into Apple that would make it illegal I cannot buy Apple stock, and so I was telling people that this is, this is, if there is. I was trying to get people to buy, not because I wanted Apple to live, but because I wanted somebody to benefit from my supposition that this is. Apple is in danger, but I don't think they're doomed with a capital D, and this is a very, very low price for what could be a very, very valuable company.

1:51:14 - Leo Laporte
And you were still like design in our YouTube chat says I bought Apple at 16. And I think he's, I think he's joining us from his mansion in the sky.

1:51:25 - Alex Lindsay
I had a person that I was, that I knew that it was at the time and I didn't have any money Like I was not making any money, so it was no, there was no, I had nothing to invest. But he said what should I do? Apple's going down and he had some stock already and I looked buy more, buy a lot more, buy a lot more. And and I said that and he, he no longer works. He dumped a bunch of money into it over, you know, over a good time.

1:51:45 - Leo Laporte
He bought a winery or something according to mr mcintosh on xcom, neither steve jobs nor bill gates was happy with the looming Bill Gates. Steve Jobs said that was my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It was bad because it made me look small and Apple looks small. Well, it's compared to Bill Gates, that's for sure. But Bill Gates said I didn't know my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions.

1:52:12 - Jason Snell
Shown here relative market size.

1:52:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, it's funny, we do these. One of the businesses that I do on a pretty regular basis is take someone from their office and put them into events like this, and when I look at this one, I'm always like that's why we tell people they should do this. If you're an executive, you're better off coming in over the screen because you're going to be really big. It's a whole Wizard of Oz kind kind of thing, especially when you tune it, uh it, it usually comes out pretty well but if you ever wonder why, why was it that eric schmidt came on stage at the iphone?

yeah, why was it that the guy from singular came on stage at the event. Why?

1:52:51 - Jason Snell
it's like they never did that again. They never made that mistake again.

1:52:54 - Andy Ihnatko
That was clearly lodged in steve's mind until dancing in dancing clean room outfits on the stage at mac. Yeah, that's not. Don't do that again, steve I love this.

1:53:05 - Leo Laporte
All of our chat folk are now telling us what level they bought apple stock at, and then when they sold it and I feel bad. Somebody uh bought it at $12 and then sold it at $14.

1:53:19 - Jason Snell
Big mistake. This is why you need to support the club, for Twit is that. We're not allowed to do that you know we can't make these tech investments.

1:53:27 - Leo Laporte
Wish we could, but we could hint about that.

1:53:30 - Jason Snell
In the summer of 1997, when my magazine just got folded and I didn't know if I was going to have a job. I was not going to put more of my life and career and money into Apple at that point, like throw more bad money into the pot. But it turned out, it worked out. It worked out.

1:53:49 - Leo Laporte
So let me get your comment as an IDG guy. Ziff Davis just bought CNET.

1:53:55 - Jason Snell
Well, ziff was my first employer. I mean, like I said, I got transferred. My wife likes to talk about how I had one job interview in my life and there's some truth in that, because I was an intern at Mac user, which was Ziff Davis, and then I was hired as an editor based on my internship and then when they merged the magazines, they just transferred me. The people who were laid off were laid off, but the people who were asked to stay didn't get a choice. They basically were told now you have a new job. So I got to live in Ziff IDG and the 50-50 joint venture, mac Publishing, which was hilarious Because, again, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, yeah, two owners who hated each other.

And yet Ziff Davis yeah, I mean Bill Ziff. I came in right after the era where editors and publishers would go to Bill Ziff's Florida mansion and drink port and I missed the real salad. He had a mansion I think it was right on the A1A, right on the coast there, where literally there was the mansion on the beach side and then there was a tunnel that took you back under the road to the, the other big mansion part. Anyway, I missed all that, but he, it was really interesting too, because when he retired bill ziff um, he wanted to give the business to his sons um the ziff brothers and and no, they sold it.

they're like we want to go into venture capital and Ziff Brothers investments, and so they sold it.

1:55:19 - Leo Laporte
They sold it to SoftBank.

1:55:21 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, they sold it to Teddy Forstman at Forstman Little who turned? Around like a year later and tripled his investment and sent it to Masayoshi-san at SoftBank. It has gone through many, many, many, many owners.

1:55:34 - Leo Laporte
I was at Ziff. During those. In the 10 years I worked for Ziff we had, I think, six different people.

1:55:41 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I was actually feeling good about being put in the joint venture at that point and then, thrown over to IDG.

Ultimately, after Pat McGovern died, they did get bought out by a VC group. That actually was people who got their VC start at IDG, so it was kind of like in the family a little bit, but anyway. So the weird thing about this is so many times had these brands gone through the wash that at one point Zip Davis bought CNET and at one point CNET bought Zip Davis. So now CNET has been bought by Zip Davis, which previously owns Zip Davis, but it's not the same CNET's not, or ziff davis. In either case, yeah, cnet got sold to somebody else and red ventures.

1:56:25 - Leo Laporte
So here's the cnet. Here's the sad cnet story. By the way I worked, I was the fourth employee at cnet for about three months, and then uh was summerly nothing like a show.

1:56:34 - Jason Snell
The door, yeah, I mean spun out of it like basically like a local tv show, right?

1:56:39 - Leo Laporte
I mean so? No, the way it started was halsey minor, who was a hedge fund billionaire, millionaire, uh, and also from the very, very famous virginia family. He went to uh uh university of virginia where there were there was a halsey hall and a minor hall across from each other and he had some money. And he and Shelby Bonney said, you know, we should get into cable TV with a tech channel. And they actually approached me, they had a marketing person, and then I was a fourth person. They asked me to do due diligence on it and I said you know, to start a cable network, it's going to cost you, conservatively, half a billion dollars. Uh, cnet I'm sorry, cnn took 10 years to go into the red at a cost of 100 million a year, uh. And then at that point they said, yeah, maybe we don't want to do that, how about if we do a website? Uh. But they always had the TV thing in the back of their mind and that's, you're kind of right, you could like.

Richard later they got Richard.

1:57:41 - Jason Snell
Hart channel.

1:57:42 - Leo Laporte
TV show which promoted the website right and actually was a very good synergy, so much so that when CBS bought them in 2008, they paid 1.8 billion dollars for CNET. Yeah, and then, and then, and then, red ventures bought it for a third of that 500 million in 2020, and now CD for a hundred hundred million.

it's kind of sad. But what's even sadder to me is that Halsey minor offered me a stake in the company for $10,000 in those early days and I said no, anyway, how many times has that happened? Yeah, it's kind of. For those of us who I've worked for both If Davis obviously was ZDTV and Tech TV and I've worked for both but neither are. They're both shadows of their former.

1:58:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they're not what they once were.

They were the giants of tech media, and I know we were talking about this on Twit on Sunday, but the innovator's dilemma I mean the truth of it is both Zip and IDG looked at the web and said why would we invest in giving away things on the internet when we're making so much money from ads and subscriptions in magazines? And so cnet was a brand built on, I would argue, the refusal by pc world and pc magazine and pc computing and some other ziff titles to embrace the web. And so somebody else came in and said well, we're going to do the computer, we're going to do that on the computer and we're going to do that on the website yeah, this was, and they did it and they took it over.

1:59:12 - Leo Laporte
This was this was very, very early on when cnet started pivoted from their original idea to do a cable channel this was 92 to do, uh, the web. And they were very smart, they got it, brought in a good tv guy, not me and they figured out that if they did some tv, bought some time on various channels, did some tv, it would promote the web and they did quite well with it yep, and over time they, they eclipsed the magazines right like pc.

1:59:37 - Jason Snell
I was because I was working at idg when pc world you know, it was very clear that I, that cnet was the relevant choice and pc world was no longer the relevant brand.

1:59:45 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, really smart on their part uh, here is a picture of halsey halsey mclean, minor, senior, um who Senior, who has gone through some troubles. I think he has some tax problems. He also famously bought a racehorse thinking it would be a winner, when in fact it was a massive loser. He said I just looked into his eyes and I knew it was going to be a winner. Apparently, he looked into my eyes and knew I was going to be a loser because we did not get along very well. It's a great story. It's a great story.

By 1994, cnet was not able to make payroll, but he convinced Paul Allen to invest $5 million for 20% interest in the company Gosh. I could have had 10% for 10,000. Oh well, and then USA Network bought rights to CNET's TV show, central TV. Let's take another virtual break so we can intrude into your thoughts with a prerecorded commercial or not. And when we return, I think it would be time for the pics of the week, if y'all are in the mood. You're watching mac break weekly with jason Snell, who's gone on his own and is. I keep looking over to this side like you're going to be there and you're not.

You're not, not, there's nothing there, it's just me Andy Anako, who's not over there, sort of is from GBH in Boston.

2:01:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm wherever you need me to be, whenever you want.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be so weird. That's a promise. It's going to be so weird. I like my attic. I've made it very comfortable, but it's going to be so weird not to have you guys at least virtually sitting around the table that'll be a tech upgrade.

2:01:38 - Jason Snell
You'll do an upgrade one and put a monitor out there with a summit or something, or yeah, I might be able to cardboard standees the situation, this the way we're doing, and I can't do that.

2:01:47 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, might, maybe cardboard that might be. And, by the way, on Sunday, alex lindsey and jason Snell started the bidding for this table. We're still measuring. Eddie, you think it'll fit in the library?

2:02:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know Nice to have a double-decker desk in here. I mean that's we could book with twice as many people in here.

2:02:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for watching MacBreak Weekly. Now time our picks of the week. Let's start with you, jason Snell.

2:02:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this fresh in this just in Flighty updated version 4.0. Flighty is a great app for flight tracking.

It is what I use. I've used it for a few years now. Give you lots of updates Where's my flight, what's going to happen to it and they have a huge update that uses other data sources some interesting data sources to give you more information about and to predict delays. So it's looking at information from individual airports and air traffic control about delays at airports so it can say your flight is delayed because of this airport or your flight is delayed because the inbound plane is late. It's doing a lot more intelligent analysis on delays. They can't detect every delay, but there's so much better.

2:03:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think there's some delays.

2:03:06 - Jason Snell
Like they don't know, like there's no data source that they can tell right now, for things like there's a crew change that sometimes happens, your flight gets delayed because the crew is not going to be there.

But there's a lot that they do know and so they've upped their game there with more warnings and they say that they can warn you as early as six hours before your flight that you may have a problem. I've definitely experienced, even in the previous versions, cases where I get an alert from flighty saying, okay, your flight moved gates or your flight is delayed, and it's minutes, if not half an hour, before the PA goes off or the screen changes at the gate, or I get a push notification from the airlines app telling me what's going on. But I already know. I also just had this happen when I was in Europe. You know they like to do the thing. I assume it's because they want you to go shopping where they don't tell you what gate you're going to until like an hour before, a half an hour before, because they want you to be like just hanging out flighty knows yeah, oh, flighty totally knows, and I was the first person at the gate, uh, just drinking my, drinking my tea, and having a digestive, and waiting for my flight at Heathrow.

So lots of good reasons. And then this is an update. Now, if you're not a regular flyer, it's going to seem pricey, because the main price for flighty is $48 a year, which I think is not unreasonable at all if you fly a lot. If you don't fly a lot, though, I will say they also offer it for $4 a week. So if you're only taking a couple of trips, turn it on, use it for $4 a week. So if you're only taking a couple of trips, turn it on, use it for a week or two and turn it back off. I think it's actually a great deal, if, if, that they make that weekly thing available for people who are not using it all the time.

But I love it. I wouldn't fly without it. It's got a great Apple watch app. Now it's got live activities, and now it is going to predict the future even better than it already did In terms of like. My understanding behind the scenes is they've got a bunch of other data sources that they're looking at now, and they've got a whole, you know, ml-based right algorithm that is trying to process that and give you a good idea about what's going on with your flight, which is it's awesome. So good app, well-designed, won an Apple Design Award like lots of reasons to like flighty.

2:05:24 - Leo Laporte
And uh, you know, check it out, check it out. I couldn't agree more. Uh, even though I don't even fly that often anymore, I just it's on my watch. It's a complication on my watch. It's on my phone. I didn't even know they had a Mac app. They do. So worth it, absolutely, flighty. Who was telling this story? I thought it was you, jason, that maybe it was you, alex, you were on a flight, maybe I was reading it somewhere. And the pilot says yeah, we're a little delayed, we'll be taking off in half an hour. And there's a guy in the plane goes no, we're going to be on the tarmac for an hour and a half and, of course, every half hour, the pilot adds another half hour to it.

2:06:01 - Jason Snell
Flighty, it's always better to know. Yeah, and they have the thing. I didn't even mention it.

They do the thing now where they send you updates by apple's push notification server to the to their live updates and they're so you get on the on the plane and if you get the free messaging, which which includes iMessage, that's not just iMessage, it's literally the entire Apple Push notification service, which means that their little payloads contain a data plate, so you can have no internet on the flight, but be on the Wi-Fi messaging only. And if you open Flighty, it'll show exactly where your plane is and what the current status is, which is pretty awesome. So, yeah, good app.

2:06:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Good pick exactly where your plane is and what the current status is, which is pretty awesome. So, yeah, good app. Good pick, mr Andy, and not co pick of the week. Uh, I started watching a four episode documentary series on hbo max, uh about pete rose, called uh charlie hustle in the matter of pete rose.

2:06:50 - Leo Laporte
It's four episodes long and uh, it's I didn't know you were a Cincinnati Reds fan.

2:06:57 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I just, I just like the story, it's okay. So I mean, you know that if you, if you, if you live your life and your career wrong, you can be legitimately one of the one of the, if not the greatest players in baseball history. But then you, of your own volition, add on to that. Oh, oh, and then he was banned for life from baseball because he bet on professional baseball.

2:07:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, and so he's been never in the hall of fame because of it banned from the hall of fame.

2:07:30 - Andy Ihnatko
No, he can have nothing to do with professional baseball, including the hall of fame. And he's been like scrapping about this like almost ever since the ever since Major League Baseball uh, delivered this sentence and so now he's 82 and he's sort of he's still on the bandwagon, but he's trying. I think he's now playing the step, the he's because he's 82, he can play the. Oh, but I'm 82 years old and how many years do I have? Oh, no, he doesn't he. He talks like he's like 58. He's perfectly fine, but he's like oh gosh, how much am I supposed to suffer? How long am I supposed to pay for this mistake?

Again, ignoring the fact that he lied and he lied and he lied and he lied about it to everybody multiple investigations, and that Major League Baseball has a really big deal about, yeah, investigations, and that major league baseball has a really big deal about, yeah, ever since, uh, we, a betting ring, convinced the white socks to throw the world series, we've been awfully twitchy about betting on professional, about on our own good, on our own games. Maybe you shouldn't do that. So it's, it's a really nicely constructed docuseries because it's about his career in which, again, you can't deny that he was one of the greatest, if not one, the greatest like player of all time. But it's, it's great because it intersperses, uh, interviews with Pete Rose with, like, not necessarily rebuttals, but like people who are in his life, who have don't have an axe to they, they, they played with them or they're in business with them or they're they're they're reporters, news, uh, sports writers, and and so every time he tells a story, like there's someone else that's like oh yeah, that's, that's pete. Like he, uh, he made, he made up that story. He actually net, we actually looked into that. And he, his, his mother, actually never like owned a farm that way or or things like.

Oh well, you want to know why? Why it was nicknamed charlie hustle. Well, I was a rookie and I was, you know, I've ran every time. I would just not just walk to first base, but I would run to first base and that was caught the eye of mickey mantel and whitey ford. He said, hey, look, look at charlie hustle, go. And then it would be followed by, like a sports writer say, yeah, they were totally making fun of them, they were they're being so, they're being completely sarcastic about it.

So it's, it's on the one hand, it's like myth making and taking down the myth, but also like the sadness of he is adamant that he should, he should be in the hall of fame, that this he's been the victim of, unjust, whatever that he's, he's suffered and he's oh my god, everything, all this sort of stuff, whereas everybody else can say that he absolutely did what he said, he was going to what he denied doing. They had him dead to rights and he has a long legacy of just making himself, building himself up and building his own legend in a way that is sometimes very charming and sometimes is really really really horrifying. But it's not like a takedown. It's more like, yeah, he's probably not going to get back in the Hall of Fame, but hey, let's at least mention what a good player he was. I'm halfway through it, so I don't know if it gets super, super dark near the end, but I'm enjoying the first two episodes so far.

2:10:31 - Leo Laporte
I feel like we're going to have the same thing with Barry Bonds. You know, because of the juicing that you know baseball is. It's funny because you know the NFL is now all in on gambling. Yeah, but you're right, baseball has a reason to kind of forbid it. Yeah.

2:10:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I always felt like Pete should be in the Hall of Fame. My opinion has been that I kind of would have preferred if it were life, life plus 20 years. If they said no, you never get to be in a hall of fame ceremony. You never get to have that weekend where everybody is praising you and saying what a great player you are. You never get to wear that ring. You never get to be introduced as hall of famer. Uh, pete rose. If 20 years after you die, whatever regime is in place decides that okay, you know what, based on his record, it's okay to let him in the hall of fame, that's fine, as long as, as long as there's a footnote on the on the plaque in bronze like oh, by the way, he was banned for life for for betting on his own, betting on his own on his own team.

2:11:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I forget where they bet on his own team or not, but he did bet on major league I don't think he did and I think that that was why it was a little bit uh, frustrating, but at the same, you know, it's frustrating in hindsight because gambling is now a big part of all major sports, yeah, and they all advertise and they and I think the nfl even gets a percent a cut from draft kings. So it's like they don't, they don't care if he bets on horses if they bet on basketball, yeah, just not on highway, whatever, but just don't bet on this one thing.

2:12:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Can we ask you of that?

2:12:07 - Leo Laporte
yeah, no but, as somebody in one of our chats pointed out, uh, a great documentary makes you care, no matter what the subject is. A great documentary makes you care, no matter what the subject is. Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose now streaming on HB. I'm sorry, max, I hate that so much. I hate it too, max has it. I guess we can wrap it up now with our good friend Mr Alex Lindsay On the bright side, by the way, if, after that one, you feel bad and you want to see another player.

2:12:39 - Alex Lindsay
if you haven't seen Facing Nolan, oh, I really want to watch that.

2:12:44 - Leo Laporte
That's on my list. So good, it's about Nolan Ryan.

2:12:46 - Alex Lindsay
Here's a player who, literally, he's like the most Texan Texan.

He just did his thing, blazing fast speed and literally pitched until his arm broke, like like just, you know just. He pitched until he was like late forties, until his arm just like ripped his arm and that was it. Then he just walked in and was like, oh, that's the end of that, you know, and moved on. Now he like raised cattle or something. So the my pick.

As we keep on playing with all the spatial, of course I keep on wanting to do more spatial, and so one of the things that I bought again the second time is this little camera here. This is the Kandao, this is a Ego camera, and what's different between this and the phone? It can't do streaming, it just captures. But you'll notice that the eyes, um, the or the lenses here are very close to the inner axial, inner, the inner axial distance is very close to my inner ocular distance, and so this is a standalone uh camera that will shoot video in side by side, so this is a straight side by side, um, uh, then I I actually I had read and we had done some.

I thought someone we were kind of working on it could use compressor for this, but I've not been successful at that. So I'm also recommending spatial phi space chillify. Spatial phi um, which is an app that you can get, that you can download, that will convert. This is a very simple app that you can use to convert the side by side to uh mvhevc, which is what you need for your headset. So if you're trying to do something, what you'll notice when you start to play with it is that the spatial feels more 3d because the the sensors are a lot further apart, um and so uh, you know this is actually the ex my exact interpupillary distance I I know because I've measured it 65 millimeters.

2:14:37 - Leo Laporte
Most people are within a couple millimeters, just like my eyes.

2:14:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's just you know, the pupils of your eyes actually don't vary that much, so it's plus or minus two or three millimeters is about all, anybody is yeah. And so anyway, so that's a. So if you're, you know it's not, you're not gonna could I stream with this?

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
no, could I like? Uh, is there hdmi out and I could have two? No, no, no, this I would love to have a. I have a. You know I'm gonna put a gopro up over my shoulder looking at the whole thing, just to stream out, but it'd be fun to have something like this you just take an iphone 15 and use what stream voodoo, which is what we use over the weekend, so that's the easiest way to do that.

2:15:14 - Alex Lindsay
I could do a permanent stream voodoo, yeah, yeah.

2:15:16 - Leo Laporte
So the but, the but, the, and I think that, if you're interested in being on the front edge, I do think that there's going to be a larger and larger demand for more spatial, whether it's Apple or meta or others, you know, understanding and the and one of the keys the only way to learn how to do this is to do lots of it, so I love it that it has a little view master attachment that clips on and then you could just look at your things like a view master.

2:15:44 - Alex Lindsay
That's cool somewhere that's really cool the funny thing is, because, because I have a, a vision pro, I don't need the view master part, right? Oh, here it is. So this is the little, this is the little section that you, you put on top when you want to view it on there it's, it's a, yeah, it's very view mastery, um and uh.

2:16:06 - Leo Laporte
So anyway, it's, but, it's a, it's, but this would also work with quest and other three.

2:16:11 - Alex Lindsay
You can output stuff and convert them very easily because it's recording side by side. Now it's still 1080p per eye, so it's not like a really high you know super high quality, you know thing, but I will say it's high enough resolution that if you want to play with this and think about it and think about 3d and think about what you might want to do, um, it is worth. It has a conversion app that you can download. I have not been successful using that conversion app. It makes my eyes cross, cross or do something weird. There's something about its own conversion app and that's why I'm using Spatialify. There's something about its own conversion app. That has not been a great experience for me I'm still working on that but overall I think that it's a fun little camera, especially if you don't have a 15 or a 16 and you just want to play with Sp um that you can, that you can play with there.

2:16:57 - Leo Laporte
So do you think at some point apple will release a iphone with a 65 millimeter separation between lenses?

2:17:05 - Alex Lindsay
it just feels like you know, when you look at it, you really want them to. I mean, for me, I want them to. Um, I feel like there's some pro version that they release. If you look at the this, this here, you know, you, I, I just I go like this and go well, the phone doesn't have to be that much, yeah, uh wider turn it sideways, but you know we're turning sideways but I feel like it would be even better to just like do it this way do a 40 millimeter would be better than than what it is.

Yeah, or just make the phone just a little bit bigger, yeah, you know, but or you could turn it sideways, but either way, you really want it to be that way, I don't. I I think that the chances of apple doing that are pretty low, just because it's a weird form factor. But it would be great to have a pro version that did that, like the, you know, the pro or the max version or whatever has something that has, um, even 40 millimeter, as you said, would be a huge improvement over what we have now. What's nice about what we have now is it's very comfortable to look at. You know it doesn't. You don't feel heavy 3D, but the hard part is that it's you only have about four to eight feet is really where it matters. Everything else after that becomes 2D again.

2:18:11 - Leo Laporte
My pick of the week isn't something you can buy anymore. If you have one, you should hold on to it. Apple's super drive is now no more. Um, if you're lucky, you can go to an apple store that might still have some inventory. This was the drive that let you plug in via usb, and it was a cd and dvd burner and player super drive and it was very slick and thin and beautiful. Actually, I don't know if you really need it, because there's still plenty of companies making these usb. We have one. They're cheap not as cheap as the super drive, but still, if you have a super drive, keep it. The uh official apple store says sold out and, given that it was introduced in 2008, 9 to 5 max says it seems unlikely they'll ever produce new units again still available in the uk and brazil. It's gonna just, it's just gonna run out. It's just gonna run out. So say goodbye to the super drive. Oh yeah, maybe amazon will have one.

2:19:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know ever, ever since we had access to cd drive sharing feature, you knew that. You knew that drive was being sherlock. Yeah, yeah, pretty quick hey, that's it.

2:19:24 - Leo Laporte
Uh, speaking of sherlocking, that's it for, uh, the last mac break weekly to come to you from the east side studios, this copper bar behind me, gone. Gone the giant gear no, I kept half of it. This half is gone, but I have half in my attic.

2:19:47 - Jason Snell
The desk unclear who's gonna get this big old desk.

2:19:49 - Leo Laporte
Somebody's gonna get it and they're gonna be happy. Um, I have in my attic a Mac, just like yours, jason, so I hope you won't think I'm copying. I promise not to do the uh, the, the lava lamp thing, because that's, that's your trademark. Great, I will have a nixie clock. How about that?

okay, I'll counter with a little that's how you'll be able to tell the difference, uh, and I hope I'll have internet because, as I mentioned, the internet went out, uh during the show today. Uh, I was in the studio but lisa was not and she said there's no internet, uh, which caused me to, during the show, order a starlink. So I'll let you know. Let you know how that works out. Thank you, Andy annaka. When are you going to be on gbh next?

2:20:35 - Andy Ihnatko
a week from thursday 12 30 in the afternoon, easter time. Stream it live or later at wgbhnewsorg.

2:20:41 - Leo Laporte
Very nice thank you, Andy. Uh live from the library jason's now live from his, from this library, that library. Yes, uh, jason, jason Snell live from the garage. It's indeed uh, six, six colorscom slash Jason for all of his many, many shows, so many podcasts, and the graphics charts are there.

2:21:03 - Jason Snell
Yeah, six colorscom. That's a great place to go for all my stuff.

2:21:06 - Leo Laporte
Everyone should go there without an ad blocker. Just turn off your ad blocker and enjoy. You know what your ads are so subtle. I mean it almost looks like you don't have that. They're hand-built sponsors.

2:21:23 - Jason Snell
They're handmade first-person text lines, in fact, probably ad blockers don't work because they're for their first party ads, right?

2:21:26 - Leo Laporte
I don't know probably not, probably not. Uh and mr alex lindsay, thank you so much. Your inspiration put me in the attic. Uh, office hours dot global. Every day of the week he streams from his garage or whatever. It's close, it feels like a garage, it's in the house but it's still it's close?

2:21:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's close yeah, we had a great, by the way, greatmattershow had a great interview with Matt Abrams from Stanford talking about how to speak in public, you know, and how to talk and have conversations, and he is he's really good at it I should watch that I, I don't know speak in public sometimes I, I know you should.

I I don't know if you'll have a lot, you'll have as many pointers, but if you're, if you, uh, um, if you're interested in that type of thing. He was pretty amazing. It was a pretty great conversation. So that just came out Nice.

2:22:21 - Leo Laporte
Graymatter.show, G-R-E-Y matter.show with Michael Krasny. Alex produces that with Michael, Longtime host on KQEDR Public Radio in San Francisco 28 years.

It's funny how in radio, time goes by really quick. I mean, you know, it's funny how, in radio, time goes by really quick. I mean, yeah, you know, it's like I'm, I'm, uh, my 50th year in broadcasting will be in a couple of years. I hope I can make it to the 50th. We'll have a little party. I hope we can make it to our thousandth twit, which is coming up in just a few episodes.

I don't know what we're gonna do uh for that one. Um, I will see you next week uh in the studio. A special thanks to our club members who made this all possible. Uh, and we are just to know just to let you know we're keeping our side of the bargain what the reason we're moving out of the studio is to save the rent, to save the PGE bill, which is almost as high as the rent. I think our PG&E bill was 5300 last month. So, um, you know, by moving out of the studio, uh, we hope to save enough money to keep doing what we do with your help and we thank you so much.

twit.tv/clubtwit if you're not yet a member, tomorrow we'll do windows weekly and this weekend google, and that'll be that we'll say a fond farewell to our cherished studio manager, John Slanina, who will wrap up his duties at the same time. Um, this security now coming up next, have a great week. And, as I have said for so many episodes and we'll continue to say for another 980, some episodes it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.