MacBreak Weekly 935 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. We're all here to talk about the latest Apple news, including the new Apple HomePod with a robotic arm, but why? Jason says this is a very bad idea. Fortnite is back on the iPhone in the EU only, and the Premier League buys a lot of iPhones. We'll explain why. With that and a lot more next on MacBreak Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 935. Recorded Tuesday, August 20th 2024. Sports are sport. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple, and today there is news from Apple. Let me introduce Jason Snell, who will be the first to know when Apple's event is coming up. Jason from sixcolors.com always gets an invite about this time.
0:01:07 - Jason Snell
I don't know, maybe next week. I don't always get an invite for the iPhone event. The iPhone event is a tough nut to crack. I I have to put in some sometimes I have to break a sweat to get into the iPhone really sometimes sometimes it's because there's look, I think about how we all cover Apple.
We're like, oh yeah, the iPhone is big, obviously, and then the Mac and the iPad and all that. The truth is it's like iPhone and then everything else is tiny, right Like. The iPhone matters so much to so many people and and in terms of the media event international media they invite people from all over the world. There's a lot of TV, a lot of a lot of press and and the you know, the Steve jobs theater is the size that it is.
So I yeah that one's a tougher, much tougher ticket than any other apple event we saw a fake invite that said September 10th, but uh, and that is your, your predicted date, but we still have no grill yeah, yeah, I mean it could be a week earlier or later, but that seems to be the most likely because there's a uh, as alex pointed out last week, actually it's a labor day holiday on September 2nd, which means that if they're doing a physical setup of a space, they would have to be paying people holiday wages, basically to work on the holiday, and I mean apple's good for it. They'll do it if they want to, but I think not not. They've done it the day after a holiday before. I think they prefer not to, and so the 10th seems reasonable. They could do the 17th as well, but you know or I mean wildcard maybe the fourth, but I don't know. I think 10th is by far the most likely date, in which case we would probably hear next week.
0:02:33 - Alex Lindsay
And if Apple's listening, I'd really prefer the 17th. I'm out of town on the 10th.
0:02:38 - Leo Laporte
That's Alex Lindsay. He's busy on the 10th, okay.
0:02:46 - Alex Lindsay
I'm busy, apple, I need you to move it to the. Can we slide that back, Andy Ihnatko?
0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
is also here, wgbh in Boston. What day would you like it to be? I?
0:02:52 - Andy Ihnatko
could really care less. I've got more on my mind about this technology industry than Apple. Apple again, you're flashy, but there's Qualcomm, there's Microsoft, there's Huawei. Oh, I know you know about Huawei. What I'm saying, apple, is that I'm covering a lot of things. We'll try to squeeze you.
0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
That's the best way to approach it Make them want you and your Dr Pepper. Okay, so we don't have any iPhone news. We have lots of pictures and rumors and dumb stuff like that, which I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about, although I understand the English Premier League, the English football League, is buying a ton of iPhones. Why, you might ask they are.
0:03:37 - Jason Snell
Why is the answer?
0:03:38 - Leo Laporte
yes, they're going to start using it instead of their video. Assisted referee technology. Referee technology for off-sides Now as our official soccer fan, Jason Snell.
0:03:50 - Jason Snell
Yes, thank you. Please explain, thanks. Soccer fan. Yeah, var is instant replay. For those who are Americans, who don't know what soccer is as a sport or anything, it's instant replay.
0:04:02 - Leo Laporte
Premier League is the top English league.
0:04:04 - Jason Snell
Number one. Yeah, it's the top english league. It's the top league, basically, in the world and the most money. And you know, your, your manchester cities and your arsenals and your chelsea's are in that league and they, they are changing. I mean, this is not unreasonable. This tech is changing so fast.
So, for example, major league baseball switched this year from their old technology, uh, to Hawkeye, which was made famous mostly from doing tennis stuff. So these are all these companies that have different camera setups, and then there's central processing that does a lot of computational photography and from that you can determine exactly where everybody was and where every object was on the field to play at any minute. So apparently, what the Premier League has done is invested in like thousands maybe, of iPhones that can shoot using an app. They're shooting it like, I forget, 200 frames a second. It's actually a high frame rate. That's required because they said that one of the problems with determining something like offsides which is where are all the players when the ball is kicked that the kick happened between two frames, so they didn't actually know which is like with people moving fast this could be an issue.
0:05:11 - Leo Laporte
This is all about a very difficult, notoriously difficult thing to ref, which is offsides.
0:05:17 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's goal detection stuff too, but they pretty much got that set as to the ball crossed, the goal or not.
0:05:22 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not that hard. Offsides is hard, that said, is the ball cross the goal or not.
0:05:25 - Jason Snell
Offsides is hard, the rule is complicated. It's a little like a lot of these sports where the rule is simple until our ability to measure reality gets precise, at which point the rule gets super complicated. So offsides in soccer, basically, the rule is if you kick it to somebody and they're the last person between them and the goalie and there's no defender in front of them, it's illegal and that that's to keep soccer from turning into a game of long passes. You need to kind of like take the ball up yourself, that there's reasons for it. But once you start getting the video replays, the hd video replays, and you can see, oh well, that finger, was the finger too far out, was the shoulder slightly one inch too far out, and it goes from being kind of a oh, the ref missed the call and now we've corrected it.
You get into this complexity of like inches in fractions of a second, and I could make an argument that you need to actually change your rule at that point to make it a little less ticky tack, because it shouldn't. That level of specificity probably shouldn't matter, but it does matter for now. And they've got all the money, so they bought a lot of iPhones and they built a new, used a partner to build this new tool where they're looking at those moments at 200 frames, a second, from all sorts of different angles, which allows them to build a, you know, basically a 3d model of the field and determine after the fact if it was offside or not. Or my least favorite thing about soccer, which is the famous goal, yay, oh, Despite all appearances nothing happened.
0:06:57 - Leo Laporte
In fact that happened, I'm told, by the club, in the Euros this year, when a goal was taken back because one little piece of a toe was offside. That's got to be frustrating, but then all of soccer is frustrating to us americans and it's hard because you get into, you know, especially with fouls and everything else.
0:07:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean you know soccer to a fair degree and also, once you start putting all these cameras out, like the problem with football, for instance, american football is that about eight people are fouling every, every play, every single play, like eight people are breaking the law, you know, and and it's like, but there are, are they going 55 miles an hour or 56, or 58, or 60? And and it's a very soft. But as soon as you start having all these cameras, it gets hard to figure out how you you know it does. It does're going to have to change a lot of the rules at some point because, for instance, in football, like you know, half the line is holding every single play and then it's just like how much are they holding?
0:07:52 - Jason Snell
And now we know I mean it's like with baseball balls and strikes.
Now, when we know you have to do something about it because we know, whereas before it was sort of like just you know it doesn't, don't worry about it. This is the way it works. It's the one that, for me, is the baseball rule about somebody sliding into second base and they put the tag on. But they beat the tag and then, as they hit the base, their foot comes off by like an inch and then bounces back down and they say, oh well, you were out because for a fraction of a second your foot wasn't actually on the base. And that's what I mean when I say some of these rules probably just need to be like well, once you touch it, if you're still kind of over it, it shouldn't matter. But the rules haven't caught up with the technology and once we see it we have to do something about it.
0:08:32 - Alex Lindsay
It's actually the we need to relax the precision to the accuracy. You know, like, like you know, like you know, like it's just you know, so like like a slide rule is what you're saying.
0:08:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, you can't go eight to point, eight digits you got baseball.
0:08:44 - Jason Snell
I mean it's a silly thing to say that there should be a hover rule where after you touch and are safe if you hover over the bag. I mean that seems dumb. It's actually common sense, that's probably, that's always how it was called before right, but technically not accurate. And so now you end up with these kind of like weird and and the offsides rule in soccer is very similar.
0:09:03 - Leo Laporte
How do premier league fans feel about all this, because I know baseball fans have, as you just described, very mixed feelings I'd say it's the same deal, it's the same thing.
0:09:10 - Jason Snell
I mean it. Sports is sports, even across cultures.
0:09:13 - Leo Laporte
So I think there are people who love vr and people who hate it okay, so let's make it.
0:09:17 - Jason Snell
Sports is not sports and it's football and not soccer, in the uk as well but other than that it's.
But no, you've got your traditionalists who are like, oh, this is terrible. But you also have a lot of fans who say I don't like the pauses, I don't like them drawing the little tv and then saying I'm gonna go look at this on the screen and nfl fans know what I'm talking about. There was always that thing where they're like, oh, let's go over and look under the hood and see what the score and and you'd be frustrated by it. But those things are also frustrated by missed calls, right?
0:09:43 - Leo Laporte
you're also frustrated when somebody calls somebody's chance to blow your lid and scream at.
0:09:49 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part is is it killing up and all that and that's the fun part of any sport, but now all the fun has been taken out because everyone's right gambling took all the fun out of football twitch says tech officiating is ruining sports Hockey, baseball and now.
0:10:08 - Jason Snell
That is definitely representing one kind of fan. But then there are other fans who will say well, wait a second, if the World Series is determined because an umpire missed a called strike, you know. And so there's a balance to be struck and I think all the leagues are kind of working on it and I think the ideal is transparency. And I think all the leagues are kind of working on it and I think the ideal is transparency. And I don't mean like we all know about it, I mean if the side judge, if the assistant I guess it's called the referee's assistant in soccer has a little thing in their pocket and it buzzes and it knows immediately that they're off sides and they raise the flag, or it knows immediately that they're not and they lower the flag and we don't need to know about the fact that a computer was involved. I think everybody would be fine with it.
The problem is when it gets this. We're living in an era where we can't get instantaneous calls and in most sports and tennis they do it. Now, at the us open, every single call is made by a computer and they play a voice of somebody saying in or out, but it's actually all being done by the computer system. So when you get to that point it doesn't matter anymore. But right now the tech is intervening in the flow of the sport and I think that most people don't like that and I I don't particularly like it either. I'd like it to be just natural. I just like it's a. Are they safe or are they out, are they offside or not? And we continue to play and we know now that it's not going to be obviously wrong anymore, which is kind of why we went down this path to begin with.
0:11:29 - Andy Ihnatko
But it works if like it adds a new. A new, if it adds a new trick to the game, if it adds a new part of the strategy which is like okay, I either a that was a botched call I am definitely going to have them review this or this was close enough that maybe we'll get lucky. But I only get one of those per game and if I do, I want to use it on something where I want to get lucky. Or do I want to wait until, like the eighth inning, where there's an obvious blown call that will decide the game and so long as there's like penalties for like overusing this, because otherwise this becomes like a who can, who winds best wins.
0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
So this new system, uh in uh. Getting back to the iphone, this new system, uh in uh. The premier league is called dragon, from a company called genius branding. Yeah, uh, this, according to this is according to Wired We'll use 28 iPhones, at least to start, at every stadium. It's not out yet, by the way, it'll be later this season. Some stadiums, more cameras, uses the iPhone 14 and newer, housed in custom waterproof cases with cooling fans connected to a power source. The team designed mounts that hold up to four iPhones clumped together, and this gives them the ability to track between 7,000 to 10,000 points on every player at all times.
0:12:55 - Andy Ihnatko
And I bet 100% that one of the purposes of that case is to obscure the fact that that's an iPhone, because you know that, like, even if, like, this technology gets someone dead to rights and they lose a vital point, they're going to be blaming the the logo on the back of the device that fingered them.
0:13:14 - Jason Snell
they're not going to be blaming, like Justice about this also the coolest super important, because if you're shooting 200 frames constantly, that phone is going to overheat so fast.
0:13:26 - Leo Laporte
Is that so the?
0:13:26 - Jason Snell
iPhone's capable of that?
0:13:27 - Leo Laporte
Is that just a? Is that just the slow-mo?
0:13:29 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's the slow-mo, it's interesting because I thought that the slow-mo was 240 frames a second, so it's interesting that it's 200.
0:13:35 - Jason Snell
They may. Yeah, I mean depending on I don't I don't know the details of if they've scaled that down, the initial system will be capped at 100 frames a second to balance latency, accuracy and costs right because they got to stream it and they got to keep it running and all of that.
But it's an interesting yeah, it's an interesting idea and and the other thing is those data points. I mean sports is being transformed by the fact that we can monitor all those points on the body and we can do things like there are those stats like we know how how far a player has run during a match. We know like lots of details, and this is true with all these sports. We know, um, everything like ergonomically about where they are during every play and then you know you can generate. Coaches are informed by that, fans can be informed by that. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. I do agree with Andy that, uh, what we've seen is that a lot of this stuff ends up being part of the theater and that maybe in the end although I kind of don't mind transparency the theater of it might be another way to go.
Usually, baseball, when they do their balls and strikes thing, they could introduce an automated balls and strike system. But they're not going to. They're going to have an appeal system with a limited set of appeals and the idea there is you have the ability to stop the most egregious things from happening. But it's not going to be part of the game from pitch to pitch, and I think that you know offsides is really when you win one nil a lot of the time, or two, one right, when it's one goal, makes the difference. It does, you know. It is kind of important to get it right and it doesn't happen that often and I can see why. In soccer especially, you know it's the difference between winning or losing, or winning or tying on a single call of a few inches.
0:15:09 - Leo Laporte
Okay, sport is sports Sport or sports is sport. Sport are sports, sport are sport. Let's see what else. Oh, I think a lot of creatives very happy about Procreate taking a stand against AI. So many drawing apps now have added AI generative features. You can't use a Microsoft app without some sort of generative AI. Procreate, on its website, said even though machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, we ain't going to use it. Compelling technology with a lot of merit, we ain't going to use it. James Kuda, who is aptly named, released a strong statement in a video posted to X on Monday. We're never going there. Creativity is made, not generated.
0:15:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, this was also really really good. Oh, sorry, you've been asking us about AI. Oh, I like his accent.
0:16:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I prefer that our products speak for themselves. I really f***ing hate generative AI.
0:16:13 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for bleeping yourself.
0:16:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't like what's happening in the industry and I don't like what it's doing to artists. We're not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products. Our products are always designed and developed.
0:16:24 - Leo Laporte
A lot of praise from the creative community about this one.
0:16:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy, I'm sorry, oh no, no, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were pulling something. Yeah, I like this. I mean, rather than just sort of hang back and make a decision, you may as well fly the flag. For a certain point of view and this is definitely a very hard line point of view, they've made their attentions very, very clearly, and it's also very good marketing, because all their competition is really really tripping over their own heels with generative AI, particularly Adobe, who just can't even like just have added a simple, necessary piece of legalese without making people think that, oh well, they're going to be stealing all of our stuff and building robots that replace us. That said, that's not the only point of view.
I think that we need to think about generative AI as a tool in the hands of a human creative intelligence, that there are lots of people who are worthy of being paid $500, $800, $2,000 for an illustration for a magazine. However, there's also a need for look, I don't have $1,000. I just want a piece of art that's relevant to this blog post that I'm writing. I don't want the generative art tool to be exploiting actual artists. I want it to be based on, I want it to be trained on, images that are either in the public domain, not free on the web, but in the public domain or for which they've paid licenses. But given that, yeah, I want a tool so that I can give a quick thumbnail sketch of what I want and then iteratively figure out how to make that through a generative AI.
0:18:01 - Leo Laporte
So as long as it's not demonetized. I mean, adobe is going all in on AI, right yeah. And so I think it's smart of Procreate to say but we're just a drawing tool we're not going to use. I guess you could always.
0:18:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, it's a really good. It's a really good to make. If you have that point of view, to use that point of view and make it so that you're not, you don't seem like, hey, we're falling behind. Oh my God, procreate used to be so good, but now gosh. I mean, I had this problem where it was a great image but I just needed to remove something and fill in the background. It can't even do that. What's up, procreate? But it's like no, from our principles. We've made a principled stance that we are intellectually not putting those features in Again, so long as it's and again, it's also really good marketing. It'll hold onto the, it'll attract and hold onto the audience that they can best serve. Again, so long as.
The only thing I would be worried about is demonization of generative AI, because I don't think that's necessary and I think that if you choose to demonize generative AI, you're basically saying that it's like people, it's like there was a generation that was like I can't believe there are people who are actually using markers. The only way to draw a comic strip is with a hard steel nib that you dip in the ink. If you don't understand how to use these tools, you're not a real artist years from now. It will be integrated enough that it will be like just like that magic, those magic brushes that we have on the iPad that can take a stroke and smooth it out and make it into a beautiful, lively line with pressure and a start and an end. I think that that's the sort of thing we're going to see in five or 10 years and we shouldn't be demonizing that kind of development.
0:19:41 - Leo Laporte
Fair enough, point well taken.
0:19:43 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's both kinds right. It's that's. The truth of it is. You know, here I am trying to advocate for nuance, but it's absolutely the case that there are people out there who look at ai and say ai is the cure for needing creative people, and that's wrong and bad. It is also true, though, that there are a lot of creative people who look at the ai stuff and say there is stuff in here that allows me to be more creative, that allows me to do things even as simple as like basic, like select subject in adobe photoshop, right, like the little tiny things that you could do, but it wasn't your creative effort. You're doing something like, you know, generating a sky replacement for a photograph, and you used to have to do that manually, and now there's a tool that uses some machine learning that does it, and it's like is that part of your creative charter to build that? It's not really an important part of your job, but it has to be done and saving them time or giving them a creative prompt.
A friend of mine who's a novelist, um, says that he has GPT chats about where he's going with his novel, and he said you know, they're not writing the novel for me they're not even plotting the novel for me, but he's got a GPT that knows the entire contents of his existing novel, so he can use it for reference. He can say where is this character, what did they do? And then he can also like say if this was happened, what do you think might happen next? And sort of see. And what he says is, again, the answers don't tell him what to write, but the answers spark creativity in himself and he goes no, wait a second, that's interesting. And then he follows it down the path. So again, it's just a tool. It can be used for good and bad. But I do understand where Procreate is coming from, in the sense that there are people out there saying this solves creativity and that's not what it is.
0:21:29 - Alex Lindsay
That's not how we should think of it yeah, and I think that procreate their, their business is to sell to people who are drawing like that's, you know they're, you know they're. Photoshop is a much more like I I use I'm probably the number one. My number one use of photoshop is generator fill, like. I just get rid of this, move this over, add more thing. I extend, I extend shots all the time for things, because to me it's just like most of what I do is not. I mean, it's creative, but it's really. I have assets that I'm building for something that I'm working on and I just need this to get done, you know, and I would never hire someone to do what I'm doing there. I just need this to be a little wider, you know, and it works really great.
But I think that procreates main business is people who do the drawing part and they're, they're drawing it, and I think that, you know, I always find that with AI, the people who have feel like they have just tons and tons of ideas and can't get them out because they don't know how to do the thing. They love AI. The people who do the thing don't love AI. So who do the thing don't love AI. So in procreates, business are the people who do the thing, and so that's, and so it's a really it's. I think it's a relatively safe thing for him to do for his vertical.
0:22:31 - Leo Laporte
It is right now. Go down that path. You think it's a mistake in the long, in the long run.
0:22:37 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you know, I think that that I think it's going to be harder to get exactly what people want out of AI. I mean, we see a lot of things that look amazing but we don't, but people don't understand around. You know, shooting a movie or building an image, it's the precision of control that you have when you have great people doing it, that they're doing something that is very hard to do. Ai doesn't do that very well, to be honest. Like it does a great, a beautiful image, but not exactly what you want. It's kind of, you know, like it's kind of like, well, it's pretty close. So like it's a really great replacement for stock photography, because photography isn't really what you wanted. It's kind of like the idea of what you, what you thought you would want. So I would not want to be in the stock photography business unless you're doing what Getty's doing, which Getty is training AI with all of the, with all of their images, and they have a backend that's going to go back to the photographer so that you can go to Getty and just ask for quite, you know, ask for stuff, so so that's going to be more valid, I think in that area, I don't know if the photographers will make enough money to survive doing that. So there are areas that are problematic. But I think that when you talk about getting just the right shot or just the right script or just the right the, you know, those things I haven't seen.
I don't think AI will get there as fast as we think it's not.
There's not that many humans that can do it well, like you know, like there's you know, like, and so they and they, we know, with all millions of people doing it and learning, that there's not that many great writers and there's not that many great directors and there's not that many great camera people. And it's just, it's a very limited number and that's what. That's what people power and I think it'll take. I think it'll take now. There are many things that I think AI will fill in that can customize the experience reading for kids in a way that a teacher could never do at scale, you know, and the kids, it can dance with what they know and keep on making things harder in a you know and now the teacher still needed when it doesn't, it can't answer the question or when the kids need to fill it in. But I think so. I think that there are places where it makes sense, but I don't think it's going to be as all encompassing as people think anytime soon.
0:24:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it's going to have. It's going all encompassing, as people think anytime soon. Yeah, it's going to have. It's going to have a role. We don't know what that role is so long as we don't embrace it as the new Messiah for creativity or lambast it as the new devil that we must shun. I think that's that we're going to.
We're going to have a fun time navigating it, cause, again, people think that people think of generative AI as doing your homework for you, and sometimes it really is just an empowering technology that will allow you to do, just again, simple things like I can't draw an entire downtown cityscape. I want that as a background for this movie I'm doing or this little project I'm doing. What I can do is I can go into my kitchen pantry, take out a whole bunch of boxes, line them up on my kitchen table and here's how I want the street to go, here's the arrangements of the building, and then simply tell the generative AI turn this into a street scene. I specifically want the Cheerios box to be like a shiny office building. I definitely want the cracker box to be kind of an old timey post office, small and snug, and then it doesn't give you. It will give you something that is at least 80% what you want, which you can then proceed to go and complete. That you couldn't do before.
But the last thing is that and this is really really uncomfortable as a creative professional, generative AI again generate the image, generate the text. It is really really good at creating something that's mediocre, that doesn't really have a particular style or point of view. That's its greatest limitation. The advancement of these technologies is shining way too bright a spotlight on how many people are okay with mediocre stuff that has no creative point of view. That's just fine. If someone needs a user manual, yeah, you could pay this person $20,000 to write a beautiful user manual that will enhance the use of your product and make you a star amongst your consumers. Or, for $800, you could get a couple of people to basically spit one out using generative AI and it will be okay. It will be what people expect from a user manual, or will be what they expect from a briefing paper.
0:26:58 - Alex Lindsay
There's a lot of user manuals that I've gotten from overseas that I would be really happy with, just okay, I mean, they're barely readable, you know, and they've got you know, and so I think that that's where AI can really, you know, make it better. And you know, I think we were. I was driving most of last week to Arizona and back with my kids and we were listening to Matilda Mann, who's a British singer, songwriter, and my daughter really likes Matilda Mann, and I said, well, what can you tell me more about this artist? I really like it. And we started Googling and we could not find any place that was a lot of information about her. So we just asked ChatGPT and ChatGPT wrote four perfect, I don't know if it's perfectly accurate, but it sure feels accurate when you look at it. And we started Googling some of that stuff and it seemed to encompass everything that my daughter knew about the artist. Um, and more and, and, and we did that with a couple of different artists, and, and it was just I.
You know, I think I was stunned by how well it just kind of compacted all the information that was available of that person into something that was readable, um, and I think that that's where it does really well. I think actually producing end product is not something that I've seen it do much yet. Yeah, but then it will get better at it. But I'm not. I'm not clear. That top one percent like we're watching what we watch now on Apple TV or Hulu or whatever is it's such a high level. The production level is so high that I think that you know we're used to looking at something that I don't think AI is going to get to any as not nearly as fast as people think it will something that I don't think AI is going to get to any as not nearly as fast as people think it will.
0:28:32 - Leo Laporte
If you use Microsoft Office on your Mac, you might want to know about this. Cisco Talos, which is their security arm, uncovered security vulnerabilities eight vulnerabilities in Word, outlook, excel, onenote and Teams. According to Talos, these vulnerabilities allow attackers to inject malicious code into the apps, exploiting permissions and entitlements granted by the user. I think maybe the most serious concern is that attackers could access your microphone, your camera record audio or video. That seems pretty bad record audio or video.
0:29:08 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, that seems pretty bad. Yeah, and this is it's part of what drives people crazy about apple constantly asking for permission. But this is what apple's saying, like we can't trust anybody to get this right, so we're going to make sure it's really hard for you to turn your camera on microsoft has acknowledged the vulnerabilities, says they're low risk.
0:29:21 - Leo Laporte
This is Microsoft's stock answer, by the way, to lately Some apps like Teams OneNote and Teams helper apps have been modified to remove the entitlement which you know, I guess, to do video comapplesecuritycsdisable-library-validation that's the name of the entitlement. Yeah, by removing that you're kind of reducing the attack surface. Word, excel, outlook and PowerPoint still use it and Microsoft has this is from a story in Apple Insider reportedly declined to fix the issues because the company's apps need to allow loading of unsigned libraries to support plug-ins. Microsoft's always done things differently on Mac. Maybe this is the wrong time to do that.
0:30:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the problem isn't. Fortunately, this isn't like they found a problem with Apple's permission system. What they found is that there is a possibility that you could use the fact that if the user has given Microsoft Word permission to access the camera, permission to access your downloads folder, all this sort of stuff, this malicious code, could then sort of like use that permission that Microsoft Word has to do something that you didn't actually approve of, and it hasn't been found in the field. It hasn't been found to actually be actionable Again, and Microsoft says that it would require a lot. It's not the sort of thing where you open a message from an iMessage and suddenly people can access your camera and your microphone.
However, it does make you wonder exactly how dependent Microsoft is on those plugins, on those unsigned plugins, that they are not even willing to close this hole just on principle. And here's the problem of using a platform that has to work on every computer for every use case everywhere in the world. Microsoft Word there's 99% of the features are things that you have nothing to do with. However, 5% of those features are so important to a small percentage that they have to stay in there and they have to keep working, even if they make that app vulnerable on a Mac. But Microsoft can't just hand wave this way. You'd want to hear them say something more specific than yeah, we're not too worried about it.
0:31:41 - Alex Lindsay
Like, oh, okay, I think we need to go back to the last best Microsoft word, which was definitely five dot one.
0:31:49 - Leo Laporte
The last best word Microsoft word was word Perfect. I think it was word Perfect. Six was the one I saw.
0:31:56 - Alex Lindsay
Mr Fancy pants.
0:31:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Word star 5.1.
0:31:59 - Alex Lindsay
And when they went from 5.1 to six, that was it was over for me.
0:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually, somebody we talked about this on Twig last Wednesday has released WordStar, re-released WordStar, which is kind of basically abandonware right, and they've re-released it as of 1992, yeah, yeah. So that if you want to download it it requires DOS. I suppose you could run it nicely in an emulator on a Mac.
0:32:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Well yeah the entire package. This is what it's. Hysterically, it's something I really really sympathize with as a fellow writer, because once you have a writing tool you really love and you and the writing tool have sort of grown together so that it's like an extension of your creativity you want to keep using it and you will reject everything else. But the argument that the fans of the WordStar make is that I just love the simplicity. It's not. It's so simple. The new word process, they're so complicated.
I like how simple WordStar is and then like well, how do you run it? Okay, well, here's a 700 megabyte app package. First you have to run an emulator and then you have to install that going. Then you have to install, find this old version of WordStar and then, once you're finished, here's the special app you need to do to get it outside of the DOSBox workspace and then to transmogrify it into something that's like okay, I mean, it's some zero sort of lateral move of effort, but at least you get to use the editing environment you like to use, and that's the most important thing.
0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
And we should point out, it doesn't have the same flaws that Word does Exactly. It will not take over your camera. All right, let me take over your show for just a minute for a commercial, and we'll get back with more with our MacBreak Weekly team. Andy Inotko from GBH in Boston. When's your next GBH appearance?
0:33:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Not next week, but the week after, on Thursday 1230. Great.
0:33:52 - Leo Laporte
Jason Snell, six colorscom. Great to see you, Jason. We'll talk about your interview with Zach Gage in a little bit. That was very cool, Very cool. And from office hours, not global, Mr Alex, and from officehoursglobal, Mr Alex Lindsay, for whom I can thank this much of the setup here in the attic. Appreciate your consultation. We brought our gaffer in Paul yesterday and he's going to relight.
In fact I apologize I started the show a little yellow because I forgot to reset the lights, but we're going gonna relight. Uh, we're also gonna paint this, uh, this medallion behind me, because it kind of looks like one of those greek orthodox halos right now, and that's and then just moved it up just a little bit.
0:34:36 - Alex Lindsay
It also looks like a prescription pill.
0:34:37 - Andy Ihnatko
It looks like. It looks like a tums.
0:34:39 - Alex Lindsay
Looks like you're sponsored by by tom, I think if you just moved it up just another like two or three inches and then gave it a gold edge, it would really have the whole halo.
0:34:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was. I have been considering that. Yeah, anyway, great to have you all. We're in the attic, as you could tell, and very happily so, in the attic.
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Back to the show. So who is Zach Gage?
0:37:38 - Jason Snell
I think zach gage is one of the world's foremost um designers, indie game designers. He thinks about this a lot. He has made some of the very best of indie iPhone games like Spell Tower and Really Bad Chess and Pilot Poker and Good Sudoku. And he recently started and it's owned by Hearst now a startup called Puzmo. That is a web-based puzzle bundle, so if you're a hearst newspaper subscriber you can sign up for this.
Other people can do it, but it's in the same space as, like, the new york times games and all of that, and it's a whole collection of games, some of them based on zach's apps and some of them are new, and it's like a puzzle. I mean, it's a puzzle subscription, just like the new y York Times game subscription is, with a whole bunch of different games and puzzles that you can play, which I think is really cool, because I mean Zach. I think his games were met with a really positive reception in the Apple indie game community and then in the broader Apple community, but putting them on the web and having a partner like Hearst means that they're going to be going out to a lot more people who've never seen what Zach and his team have done.
0:38:47 - Leo Laporte
And you can play it for free. Ad-supported right.
0:38:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's free stuff and then there's stuff that you need to subscribe to get it's freemium right. So some puzzles are premium, I think, and some things in your user settings in your community. I don't know. Off the top of my head, but it's a little bit of both. You can play a lot for free and then you can do more if you pay.
0:39:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you've mentioned Zach before, and I think it's really cool. I think it's really great, very important to interview developers about their experience in the real world and so forth. Does he have any apps, though? Is he an App Store guy? I forth does he have any apps, though? Is he a app store guy? I mean, yeah, oh so all those apps, those are all actually really bad chests.
0:39:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I use good sudoku.
I love it all of those are in the app store okay and then, um, and then he's now done this web, this website, and so we talked about they launched a new game called pilot poker and I I got a chance to talk to him for a little while and posted the edited interview on Six Colors and he's a really philosophical guy. So, starting with poker, the idea of how do you take a game that's all about betting and cash on a website where there's no cash, how do you do that? And he uses cash as a money, as a framing device sort of, for the game. But he talked about how do you simplify it and what's good about poker, and one of his insights is you can play poker every week with a group of four friends and then after a year, a random person comes in and sits down and they can play it and they can win and that's just how. That's how poker is. It's kind of a common understood thing. So they adapted it and pocket run poker or not, pocket run poker?
Uh uh, the, the posmo uh poker. What is it called?
0:40:32 - Leo Laporte
I forget now, pilot poker he likes the alliteration like 10 million dollars a day, yeah, but it's not real. It's not real money, but it's like part of the flavor of it.
0:40:41 - Jason Snell
Right, but it's actually a puzzle game because you get five cards and you have to play four of them and you have to try to create hands. Four card hands, fun, uh, to the side and bottom.
0:40:51 - Leo Laporte
But so anyway, it's like wordle poker yeah.
0:40:53 - Jason Snell
So talking about like why he does it that way and how he like one of the insights that that I got from talking to him. As I said, zach, you can only play five hands a day. If this was an an app, you'd have to play infinitely". And what he said was actually I don't like that. You can play it five times a day. I wish it was less, I wish it was three times. Because he said in testing it, yeah, I absolutely was up till 1am playing it endlessly and I felt kind of empty and gross. It's like I don't want people to feel that way. I want them to have fun.
And he said he told me a story about how he played a roguelike game with a friend of his and they made a pact to only play it once a day and watch the other one do it. And what he said was he got really good over six months at that game because that one play a day mattered. He was focused on it. It wasn't just mindless, it was focus. And he thinks that that is. He said if he did this game as an app, he would have to have an infinite mode where you could play it forever, but what he'd really lean into is a daily challenge, because then that's the one that focuses you and that's the one that matters.
And all of these games where you can play forever can end up seeming like work.
They end up being kind of like another assignment for you. I've got to tend to my games today and that's not a thing that he really wanted, it's just it's somebody who spent a lot of time thinking about how our human brains work with games and what makes them good and what makes them bad, and trying to give people this positive experience, like he said. You know, I didn't really think about it this way, but he said so much of the internet is um is negative interactions. It's people getting angry or people saying can you get a load of this guy or here's a video that'll make you sad. And he said the good thing about something like wordle and everybody sharing their wordle scores is it was more like hey, I did a thing and you know what do you think of this thing? And and he says that sort of thing, it is good and the Internet is good at it, and he wants to facilitate making more things that do that sort of thing, because that's another way to use $340 in pile up poker.
I'm rich. That's not a good score. That's not a good score, but it's a start. It's a start Anyway, very, very thoughtful guy. Start, it's a start anyway. Very, very thoughtful guy. Um, and he, you know he has some thoughts about probability and, like sid said, meyer has this line about how if it's 90, 90 probability, you need to have the player win 100 of the time or they get angry. And he's like that's completely wrong.
If I tell you to flip a coin and that it's a 50 50 chance and it comes up the wrong one, you don't go, this is rigged, you know, you don't, you don't do that. So, uh, yeah, smart guy, really interesting and glad I got to talk to him nice, love that check out the interview they like six colors colorscom yeah uh, fortnight, speaking of games, is back on the iphone.
0:43:40 - Leo Laporte
Don't get your hopes up. It's only well get your hopes up if you're in the EU, in the EU, yes, thank you. Thank you, european uh uh. Competition commissioner. Outgoing competition Commissioner, margaret Margarita vestiger. Thank you, uh. Epic has launched its game store. Anything to say?
0:44:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean every the world has not come to an end somehow yeah, uh, I mean it is only europeans, I gotta sign into my wired subscribe.
I hate condi nest because it's actually it's impossible to sign into your wired and, of course, as soon as soon as it wound up in europe, all kinds of how-to guides and here's how to get it working. The the store working in the us. Yeah, it's. It's really, really tricky. You have to like have a paid, like app developer license. You have to be if you have to be a 99 a year, uh apple developer in order to give your phone the entitlements you need to make it happen. And you have to ask yourself is this, this really really worth it? Yeah.
0:44:46 - Leo Laporte
How does Tim Sweeney feel? Is he happy? Is he satisfied? No, he wants more. Never to both questions no matter what the question is.
0:44:56 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't think we'll know whether it's success or not for six to 12 months. You know, like we used to see. I mean, it's there, some people are going to start downloading and the question is is how many people will actually use it? Number one and number two is there, will they see any malware and will there be any problems, and and so, and if there are any malware problems, I'm sure Apple will tell us in an advertisement. So so, so the so I think that we don't know really right now how, how you know how how much people are going to use it.
0:45:24 - Leo Laporte
So and you may remember, epic sued apple in the us and uh lost. In this case, I mean, they won, uh, you know a little bit, but they weren't able to force apple to open up their app store, uh, to an epic app store. However, the eu's digital markets act did make that happen and um, epic says it plans to eventually bring its games to Aptoids iOS store in the US, I'm sure in European Aptoid is a good word and the one store on Android. It says in a blog post we look forward to bringing our games to other stores around the world. Tim Sweeney says we're really excited and grateful for the European DMA law.
0:46:04 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, the reality is, if someone's a really avid user of a lot of the Epic tools, then it's good. They're providing something that they can have. They can lower the margin and everything else. I don't know how many average people will jump over to that, but for the folks that really want to use it it'll lower the cost of buying and selling goods.
0:46:23 - Leo Laporte
This was a long battle. Cost of buying and selling goods this was a long battle. Remember, apple shut down the Epic developer account in the spring, called the company verifiably untrustworthy. They were kicked off iOS. This is what started the whole lawsuit. The inquiry from the European Commission forced Apple to reinstate Epic's account, but then it didn't like the buttons. Remember, it didn't like the buttons. So finally it is there and, uh, the store has three first party games. They say they're in discussions with others, but really the reason for the store is fortnight, I would guess.
0:46:58 - Alex Lindsay
Right, that's the main point yeah, to buy and sell goods. Yeah, you know, I mean, yeah, I think that's the. You know they want to be able to buy and sell, sell virtual goods, and they don't want to pay apple 30 to do that.
0:47:07 - Leo Laporte
So so they still have to pay the core technology fee 50 cents a year for each install after the first million.
0:47:12 - Alex Lindsay
That's right yes, I think they're. I think they're appealing that in the eu. I think they're. They're in it right now, but I think that that's one of the things that they're complaining and the eu is reviewing as to whether that fee can stick or not.
0:47:24 - Jason Snell
But you know who doesn't have to pay it or at least he doesn't have to charge his users for it is Riley Tested of AltStore, because they got a grant from Epic that is one of their mega grants, or whatever it's called. So basically it's going to cover their core technology fee for AltStore in the EU. So they're not going to charge their users an annual fee for AltStore in the EU. So they're not going to charge their users an annual fee for AltStore in the EU thanks to Epic. So it's another case of Epic and Tim Sweeney sort of like trying to make alternative app stores in Europe as viable as possible, even if they have to throw their own money. He's basically comping anybody in Europe who wants to use Riley Tested's alternate app store instead of his or in addition to his. He's comping them by giving him that grant, which is that's pretty cool.
0:48:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I mean we've had discussions in the past about how this is all. These are just like a trillion dollar company and a another hugely successful, like multimillion dollar, billion dollar company going at it. But the thing is like an independent developer can't go after Apple about this. It's only a company like Epic that can go after it, and if they win, they create a pretext for the smaller developers to make the choices that they feel is correct for them. So, yeah, I think this is overall, like a pretty big win.
0:48:42 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be again. The danger with all of these, for all the stores, is, if any, if any store misses the mark, apple will bury them with it, like you know it'll. You know it'll like so that, so, as as more stores proliferate, all every store is a risk to all the other stores if they don't figure out how to keep the, because the reason they're building these stores is to get around a lot of the apple rules. They're designed to keep everything you know, quote, unquote safe and everything else, and so if they're not safe and that something does come out, that has a pr problem, um, you know, I mean, this is, this is how apple keeps it out of. The united states is using it against them, you know, and so so I think that they're, they're really, it's a and again, you can definitely expect that if you're, uh, if you, if you go down the, the alternate store route, probably not going to get invited to Cupertino so that's fine oh, it's so easy not to get invited to Cupertino.
0:49:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I think I think they'll use some of that, like 30 percent that they're not spending to Apple, to buy their own damn phones. That'll be, that'll be just fine, I think.
0:49:41 - Alex Lindsay
I just think that you know you're just deciding that forever you don't want to work with. You don't want to work with Apple on anything like you want to use their platform, but you don't really want to, you don't want to be friends, so that's, and that's totally fine. You can. You can decide that you didn't care, and that's fine, and you're upset. But you are as a developer. You are making that decision Like you know it's, it's Apple's not going to have a short memory.
0:50:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I think a lot of them are just making the decision that there is only so much mud I am willing to eat and call ice cream. At some point I have eaten enough mud and been forced to call it ice cream that I am now really really very, very well engaged into the problem of how do I get out of not eating mud and being forced to call it ice cream, and that's a lot of. This really is principled stuff and this is a. It's a similar but unrelated legal operation where it's Spotify has won the because of, not the EU's anti-trust, anti-competitive laws, but because of a separate ruling about how Apple runs music stores. Spotify won get this the amazing ability to, on their app, mention that there is a special promotion going on on the Spotifycom website. Okay, they still can't link to Spotifycom. If they do, they're going to be charged a 27% fee of anything that they get by people following that link. But the fact that they had to like, have an entire, like government crackdown and say, yes, you're being unfair. Allow Spotify to say, by the way, if you, if you sign up for a pre, we've because we're excited about signing this new artist If you sign up with this new premium account, we will give you, like, a 20% discount. It's like you can't even just mention this anywhere with Apple. Every discount it's like you can't even just mention this anywhere with Apple.
Every single music app, including Apple's. Like, oh, when you launch it, so often presenting you with something other than the music that you actually wanted to come to, they want to show you. Oh, we've got these new playlists. Oh, we've got this new promotion. Oh, we've signed this new thing. Oh, check out this thing. Like, but no, you can't have Spotify. Say, oh, if you go to our website, the Nuremberg trials this is where Geneva had to come in. The Hague had to get involved in order to put that text in the Spotify app. That's how hairy the situation is getting. It's weird, and I hope that Apple gets ahead of the ball, because they're going to be facing so many problems on so many fronts legally, because this is the one area of their operations where it is really hard for them to make a principled argument that they're doing something because it's best for the market and it's best for their users. This is the one place where they are AT&T, they are Microsoft. They are not the good guys.
0:52:30 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly we are the good guys. Uh, you're watching mac break weekly we are the good guys. Uh and uh. We do this every tuesday and we're glad you're here to join us. Andy inaco, alex lindsay and jason snell we continue on.
Uh, let's talk about the google decision. Uh, we've been talking about that quite a bit since it came down. A couple of weeks ago, the judge, ahmed Mehta, ruled that Google was a monopoly and, in particular, among other well, not in particular, but among other things focused on the fact that Google pays something like $30 billion a year in traffic. Acquisition costs $20 billion to Apple, a couple of billion to Mozilla for Firefox and a couple of billion to Samsung in order to be the default search engine on those platforms. The judge didn't like that and it seems, according to Benedict Evans, this is a great piece competing in search. It seems likely the judge is going to turn off the faucet for those payments as part of his judgment. The question is now what happens next. Benedict talks about whether, apple losing that $20 billion, you should even continue to use Google search. Should Apple create its own search engine Do?
0:53:54 - Jason Snell
they want to compete, they have one yeah.
0:53:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's one of the things Benedict says is that they've been spidering for a decade. Yeah, and you see it in.
0:54:02 - Jason Snell
Spotlight and you'll see it in some of their other places. They made an agreement, though, with Google. Part of the deal here is they could have done their own and they felt like it was. You might as well take the money from Google, although, I will say, I'm unclear on what the remedy is going to be. Nobody really knows, but I think it's interesting that the problem apparently is that Google is the default and that, keep in mind, lots of search engines have deals with Apple and it's a traffic based deal. It's like an affiliate system where if you use Bing or DuckDuckGo and you do searches from the Safari bar, they pay Apple. Right, even though they're not the default, they pay Apple.
So I wonder if the resolution of this might be as simple and unfulfilling as not allowing Google to be the default and making people choose, but maybe allowing Google and other search engines to continue compensating browser makers for searches done in that browser.
Right, it's a little bit different, right? It's like we're not paying you to be the default, we're just paying you for our cut of search, in which case Apple and Mozilla, you know, would keep a lot of their money from Google. It just wouldn't be the default anymore, because the truth is, it's not the placement that makes Google the number one search engine. Google's going to be the number one search engine if people choose to, and I think that's part of the problem here. And part of the fantasy is, if you let people pick, they'll pick Google right. If you choose Bing for them as the default, a lot of them will just switch it back to Google. So I don't know, but I do wonder if there's a way for Apple to ultimately hold on to a lot of this money if they stopped Google being the default but continue to take money for the percentage of searches that go through Google.
0:55:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a very weird ruling. I finally finished reading it and it's like so much of it is almost a love letter to Google. You know there's so many pull quotes where I'm thinking, because the judge was explicitly saying that, like the reason why Google is number one is because it's the best product. Not only is it the best product, but everybody thinks it's the best product. The people who want a default search engine on their phones want Google because it's the best product, and it's because the users want that as the best product.
And how did it become the best product? Through anti-competitive measures? No, the judge says, because they have been spending. They've been investing an immense amount of money since their first $100 investment in Google for 20 years, building this as the core of their entire business. The judge even went ahead and said that they continue to innovate, despite the fact that, in the way that the judge chose to define the market, even though they have 90% of the market, they continue to invest and innovate in this platform, and so that's why it led to a lot of people who are actual antitrust lawyers wondering how long is this going to stand up on appeal?
This might be something where the DOJ is going to want to negotiate a way out of this, where the DOJ is going to want to negotiate a way out of this. But the scary thing, though, is that with antitrust, it's not a question of okay. The judge has found that it was improper and anti-competitive for Google to pay these $50 million for primary placement and exclusive bindings for this, that and the other. We are going to order you to not do that anymore and also assign a fine and a penalty. No, the point of antitrust is to restore the market to a place where anybody can compete, to basically make sure that, if they think that Google has an impenetrable advantage, they are empowered actually ennobled to break apart the market if they have to, and put it together in a fashion where this market can be free for anybody to participate in.
0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
I like Evan's conclusion on this and I think it coincides nicely with what you're saying he says. One lesson we might draw from all the previous waves of tech monopolies is that once a company has won and network effects have become self perpetuating and insurmountable, then you don't beat that by making the same thing but slightly better and getting a judge to give you an entry point. You win by making the old thing irrelevant. Google didn't build a better pc operating system or a win32 office suite, facebook didn't do better search and Apple didn't do a better BlackBerry. His point is, the day of this kind of search index might be over anyway, that AI might solve this whole problem Right which is why it's kind of important to think how do you do?
0:58:46 - Jason Snell
And I think you can see it in how Apple is going to structure their world knowledge. Part of uh of their ai story which is, even though they've mentioned gpt, like they haven't crowned gpt. I know I talked about this here after wwdc. It was like the least whelming, it was deeply underwhelming endorsement of a partner. Right, it was like, hey, chat, gpt will be here, but we'll warn you and we're only going to use it for these certain kind of queries and there will be others, not just this one. They're like no, no, no, no, no.
A little bit on the eu, for apple intelligence is if they come in with a bunch of different world knowledge providers and say take your pick and let them compete. And it's google and it's open ai and maybe it's some others, perplexity or whatever and it's like go to town, you pick, and maybe they've got deals with them. Apparently, the gpt deal is that they nobody's paying anybody right now, but like, but it's not, here's a winner, we've picked a winner, it's you pick and the market will sort it out, and that Apple, as somebody who, at least right now, doesn't seem to want to play in that game, the world knowledge game. I think that benefits them to say let's let everybody fight this one out and we won't pick a winner, but we'll win regardless, because they all are on our platform.
1:00:13 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's what they're doing, and number one for the Google ruling. I mean this is one ruling. I mean we're years away from them having to do anything.
And again so you know, like there's probably three to five years, that's still there in the current Supreme Court structure, the government probably couldn't win.
But it's three to five years away and there'll be new appointments and there'll be new things and everything else, and so it might change by then.
For the Apple thing, I think Apple's plan is to win all of it by taking over, being able to answer 90% of your questions inside of their environment and letting you go to the 10% and just use those all anything else. For that outer 10%, they don't have that right now, but I think that you know if they have, if they get very good at you know we can answer most of what you're trying to do with verified information that is not got, you know, is not encumbered by a lot of copyright issues and and it is, you know it's probably going to be accurate most of the time Um, and it's private and it's on your phone and on your hardware and everything else. You know Apple's going to win a lot of things that way. And then we have this little release valve that's called the third, that third thing, that little like you can still do it and I think that that's going to be really hard to compete with long-term for folks.
1:01:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And Apple if they just focus on whatever it is that they do with AI. It works great and it is something that you can't imagine using your phone without. That is still a win. They don't have to win everything Like I've. One of the recurring themes during the Pixel 9 launch event, which was really just really mostly an event for Gemini, for Google AI, was that. Oh well, we have a very much enhanced personal assistant and it's actually shipping this week and we're all informed by real-world live information through our knowledge of Google Search, and that's great, and I've had it for the past week and there's so many things that it's really, really super good at. I was at an international food market with bins of amazing, weird cAndy, individual wrapped candies I couldn't figure out because they're in Russian, they're in Ukrainian, they're in Portuguese, and so I just had my phone, was just having an ongoing conversation with Gemini saying what is this and saying, okay, this appears to be a Russian hazelnut cAndy with the new one, so it knew.
And it worked, it worked, it worked, it worked. However, it doesn't really work the way that I want it to work as a personal assistant, because there is still, like this, crosstalk between what Google defines as the Google assistant, like hey, guillermo, set a timer for 15 minutes. Hey Guillermo, what's the weather? Hey Guillermo, remind me of this at 1230 pm on Tuesday and the stuff that the super AI can do, the AI client can do. If I'm so much so that I've kind of reset, you can just flip a setting to say, okay, I don't want to use Gemini as my personal assistant. So instead, when I hold down the power button, I still get all the functionality that I've been getting off of the Google Assistant for the past several years. And when I want something that I want an actual, like living voice to speak to, to work something out with, that's when I tap the actual, I launched the actual Gemini button. What I'm saying is that if Apple, when they release whatever they do with AI, whatever it is, it works great, I don't have to figure out that. Okay, I'm going to want to switch this off, at least until the next iteration of this feature comes on. They can make a really, really good play of it.
That said, remember that they're not playing this game at the same level as Google and Microsoft and other companies. Are Google really wants, as the saying goes, is this a product or is this just a feature? Apple right now seems to be pursuing AI as a feature, whereas Google is really doing it as a full end-to-end product. But again, that's another advantage For people who want an iPhone. That seems smarter. So long as Apple is putting all of its efforts into making this into a really great feature for users the iPhone 17 versus the Pixel 10, maybe the iPhone is going to seem a lot smarter, a lot more useful, because it doesn't screw up nearly as often.
1:04:27 - Leo Laporte
Let's see. Well, you know, and, by the way, we don't know what the judge is going to do. Let's see. Well, you know, and, by the way, we don't know what the judge is going to do. I think it would be kind of counterproductive to turn off those traffic acquisition payments, because it would probably kill Mozilla, making Google's Chrome be even more dominant.
1:04:44 - Jason Snell
So talk about unintended consequences. Multiple companies are harmed by that and Google gets to keep money. Keep its money.
1:04:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it saves Google. Google 26 billion a year and everybody else.
1:04:53 - Jason Snell
That is a random remedy right, and yeah, it's not a good, I just I can't see it.
1:04:57 - Alex Lindsay
I can't see anything happening until it went all the way to the supreme court, like anyone being forced to do anything until then. So I think we're talking, you know, again, three to five years, and google it may not be relevant by then. You know, with the speed that things are working with I, I feel.
1:05:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I feel as though at some point there's going to be a negotiation. The government's going to get some stuff, google's going to get some stuff. Maybe all Google will really have to do is allow other search engines and other products to have access to Google. Some of Google search is secret sauce. Maybe they don't have to crack open the entire search algorithm, but at least they will open up some of the metrics that they use to figure out what's good, what's bad, or like what seems to be AI generated, what seems not to be AI generated, what seems to be low value versus what is high value.
That's the sort of thing that could be on the table that would allow Google to continue to live, thrive and survive, because the big problem is that it's not just shutting. It's not really shutting other people out. It's access to all of the data that Google gets by being the primary search engine for the iPhone. Again, they're not collecting personal information, but they're getting all of those search queries and they are getting so much more sophisticated just by virtue of having access to that pipeline. And if that pipeline were to shut off, that wouldn't end google search, but it would be a very, very big obstacle for them to to get over in a nutshell, the reason for antitrust actions is the big get bigger based on their bigness.
1:06:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and uh. They're not punishing google for being big. They're punishing, they're trying to prevent google from using that bigness I.
1:06:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think the problem is the government has, you know they've they fired off too many, too many failures, too many failed shots at these, at these legal. You know they they got very aggressive in the last four years and they fired off too many and they failed too often. Where companies don't really have a reason to negotiate. I think that they have a feeling like, yeah, we're probably going to win this one, you know, and because they've been winning most of the time. And so I think the problem is when you, when you take a lot of adventurous opinions and you have taken a lot of adventurous lawsuits, which is what the government's done in the last four years and you lose a lot of them, it means that the companies that you're suing now go.
Maybe I'll, maybe I can, maybe I can, I have a pretty good job, but we I've, you know, and so the you really got to. You know, this is kind of a aim twice and shoot once or measure twice, and they're not doing that. They're just like we're going to cut this board every place we can find it. And because they've lost so often I think they've lost a lot of their ability to scare companies into settlements because they just don't. I don't think the companies cause I don't think that. I think there's very low chance that this case could make it to the Supreme Court and actually win in the current environment. So I think Google's going to look at it the same way. Going well, I think we can take this all the way out.
1:07:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Joe Tainter the government's still very hot for this the FTC. I don't think it's a coincidence that the FTC filed an amicus brief on another piece of bad news for Google that came out last year. Where on us they were? Uh, they lost an antitrust suit in California that I think are based on California's antitrust, and this was based on the, the Google Play Store, the Google's app store, and so now we're moving into the, the next phase, which is the okay if they've been ruled as in violation of antitrust. How do we correct this? So the ftc filed this 22-page amicus brief. That is blistering, it is. Burn them, burn the buildings to the ground, send their chips.
1:08:22 - Alex Lindsay
I mean they have a lot of opinions like all the again.
1:08:25 - Andy Ihnatko
This is the quote after quote of of supreme court like cases mostly from the 40s and 50s, so maybe it's not terribly relevant of that again, the whole points. So maybe it's not terribly relevant of that again the whole point.
It's not. It's not good enough to simply punish them. The point is to make sure that they lose every single advantage they gain because of that action. And given that they, whether it goes through or not, I don't think it's going to be that bad. But the fact that that any, anything that you do that conceivably can get you the death penalty will give you pause.
1:08:55 - Alex Lindsay
I mean maybe maybe you will.
1:08:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe you will like cop a plea to say well, I will, cop, I will. I will take 30 years for for second degree murder. Please don't don't hang me on my capital one.
1:09:06 - Alex Lindsay
I mean that's going to be bad. The problem is when we say the government, we should, we should define this, as one branch thinks that this is important.
1:09:12 - Andy Ihnatko
So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the essentially the cops for reinforcing all the laws that exist.
1:09:19 - Alex Lindsay
So that's not a small branch.
Congress doesn't want to do little movement, but it hasn't been. It's been petering out, and so I think that the problem is is that it's you know, that's, and, and we have to, you know, look at, I mean, there's a pretty good chance that the people that are there now will probably be there in next year, but if they're not, it's over, like all of this disappears, you know. So there's, there's a lot, you know, because it's still, it's still close. I mean, it's a much better chance now than it was before, but it's still, you know, a toss-up to what will happen in November, and then they don't have to think about it for another four years yeah, also, if you compare, like the, the party plat.
1:10:03 - Andy Ihnatko
On Monday, uh, the DNC released their pla, their party platform for 2024, and as far as as how it will affect huge tech companies, they couldn't be more opposite.
That it's not, as the DNC's platform isn't quite as hostile as it was in 2020, but it's still the idea of we need to regulate, we need to rope in these powers of $2 trillion companies, whereas powers of two trillion dollar companies, whereas, granted, the, the rnc's party platform is pretty much a whole bunch of you know truth social posts, but still it's mostly like what do we have no business restricting the economy. We have no business restricting big companies and punishing them for being great, and we're gonna, we're gonna roll, and the simple, the simple fact that the biden administration was so hot about prosecuting this stuff is the reason why they might not be terribly interested, although I'm just catching myself by reminding myself that the doj's antitrust action against against the google search actually was started during the trump administration yeah, this is actually a non-partisan issue, but for different reasons, and that's the funny thing about the whole thing, uh, and that's why politics shouldn't have anything to do with this, and one of the reasons it should go through the courts.
1:11:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think, I think not, I think, politicians.
1:11:16 - Alex Lindsay
I think it definitely belongs in the courts. So so I think that it. I I think that in three to five years, we'll know what it means.
1:11:21 - Leo Laporte
What it means yeah, yeah, it's too bad and hopefully we'll still be here. Actually it's a good thing, courts don't move very quickly compared to the tech industry yeah, inevitably that.
1:11:28 - Jason Snell
What that means is that by the time we get a final result, it won't matter, it's meaningless.
1:11:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, although I think you can make a strong argument that the at&t breakup was effective, that the microsoft action was effective.
1:11:39 - Jason Snell
Um, I, I you know, I think there are things that, uh, well, this is, this is a more of a philosophical uh discussion about what government shouldn't do, but in the end I think a lot of times what happens is the act of going through the process leads to change, right the final end result may not like. By the time we got to the moment about like Internet Explorer and Microsoft, it was sort of like almost irrelevant. But the chilling effect and the fact that Microsoft went through all of that, the fact that Google is going through that, that Apple may be going through it, like we've talked about it here things that Apple has changed its policies, not because there's been a final judgment on them in Europe yes, but not some of their worldwide policies but because the walls are closing in and I think that may be the biggest effect for something like that.
1:12:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the chilling effect and the hilarious thing is the things that it doesn't affect. Like AT&T is still massively affecting our ability to get Internet, Like you know they, because they don't get poll access. You know so their poll access policies of dragging their feet there, I mean those companies, the companies that used to be AT&T on that split up, are still thwarting our ability to get Internet. You know, and so and so that hasn't you know whatever. 50 years later we're still, or 40 years later.
1:12:53 - Leo Laporte
We're still paying for the, we're still paying the price for dane jasper of sonic about that. He's you know he would love to put sonic fiber everywhere. But yeah, they won't let them on the polls. Yeah, even though honestly, I think the government requires them to. But they, they drag their feet, the.
1:13:09 - Alex Lindsay
I have a friend that owns an ISP that I mean not just Danium, but I have another friend that owns a much smaller ISP and I mean it is just brutal. And the thing is, is that that has like? We can talk about all these antitrust cases and everything else, but the access to internet has a far bigger impact. Access to inexpensive, high-speed internet has a far bigger impact on the average person than Apple or Google or even live nation. And the fact that we're not taking this is the only antitrust we should really be focused on.
And the fact that we're not is because they pay they pay our politicians so much money, you know like, and so we just have to understand, like the reason that's there is essentially corruption, you know like, and and so you know, and so, and it's incredible, like that is because I, you know I looked at I was driving through Arizona, going, hey, this would be a really great place to live, you know, if I was, if I wanted to. You know, go some. Flagstaff is gorgeous and but the flag, but the, the internet in Flagstaff is horribly constrained, and I was like, well, I can't, you know, and it's, and it definitely affects communities, you know to not be able to have open access to the Internet more than probably almost any other antitrust that we've seen go by.
1:14:17 - Andy Ihnatko
You know it's nuts, and this is why it's on top of all of my thoughts about all these antitrust actions. Even when I think it's appropriate to put some pressure on Apple and Google and Microsoft and all these other companies, it's like the thing is great. So now you're putting pressure on Google search, the product that everybody acknowledges is the best in its field, to the point of that there's almost no direct competition to it because it's so good. It's the one product everybody wants. They want, and so the court is conceivably messing around with that, but they're not taking up the. They're just now getting around to doing something about Ticketmaster and Live Nation, and they're still not doing anything about how communications and broadband companies have lockdowns on how they provide services to communities or don't provide services to communities.
1:15:04 - Leo Laporte
If you start picking cherry, picking the things that they're not doing. A good job of you can go on and on and on. A good job of you can go on and on and on. Yeah, later on in security. Now we're going to talk about what is probably the largest data breach of of all time. Uh, possibly due to a data broker. Uh, giving putting the passwords in the clear on a website, in a zip file, I mean, and there is, to this day, no, no federal regulation against data brokers. The biggest privacy, I mean. Forget cookie consent banners. What about data brokers? Let's get rid of them. Anyway, you can go on and on. If you start doing that, it's kind of an endless supply of malfeasance in the world. Let's take a little break. You're doing the MacBreak Weekly thing Andy Ihnatko, alex Lindsay, jace Snell break, or what you're doing, the mac break weekly thing Andy inaco, alex lindsey, jace's, snell.
Uh, we have settled on a date and time for the new york city meetup. By the way, I wanted to pass this along. Club TWiT members already know this. Uh, I've been talking to joe, who was in our club TWiT. He's a street photographer. He's offered very kindly to do a photo walk. So here's what we're going to do. On Saturday, September 7th I will be in town. We're going on vacation, that's the first stop and we're going to meet up in Bryant Park. We decided we wanted to do it outdoors due to the rise in COVID, but also because then we don't have to get a bar to agree, and we'll start that at 3 pm in New York City.
Saturday, September 7th. We'll meet up for a couple hours. Then Joe's going to take us on a photo walk and he has a wonderful itinerary. Let me just look at this because I put it up in the events on the Club TWiT Discord. But, by the way, you don't have to be a Club TWiT member to do this. It's going to be so much fun and since we're in Bryant Park, we could have millions of people show up, so we'll have lots of room for you. You don't have to go on the photo walk if you don't want to. There it is, thank you.
So we're going to walk to Grand Central Great place. The sun will be sliding in through the windows, should be a great time to take pictures at one of the most amazing railroad stations in the world, then the tudor city overpass the chrysler building in midtown subway if you wish, if you feel comfortable. I can't wait to washington square park. That is a lot of fun to watch the buskers there and the students meet up. Then doyer's street, some pictures of bloody angle and chinatown, the manhattan. Some pictures of Bloody Angle and Chinatown, the Manhattan Bridge. Take pictures of Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and Chinatown during the golden hour and if there's time, we'll go to Cortland Street so we can get some photos inside and outside the new Oculus, which is kind of a sight to be seen. So if you're in New York City or the East Coast anywhere, September 7th, saturday afternoon in the park, 3 pm at Bryant Park in New York City should be a lot of fun. On, we go with the Vision Pro segment. What do you see?
1:18:09 - Jason Snell
what do you know?
1:18:10 - Leo Laporte
it's time to talk to vision pro lyrics by Andy and not go another 18 cents in my pocket yes, every time we play it there's actually only one statement. A story, I think it's uh was put in here, uh, by resident Vision Pro guy, jason Snell. Apple is apparently giving private demos showing off Vision OS 2.0 with features that are not yet in the beta and including some enterprise AR demos. Yeah, that was actually me, oh thank you, Andy.
1:18:49 - Andy Ihnatko
It was so a user on Twitter, an analyst, I think, basically just made a tweet. Oh yeah, apple, I'm having a private meeting with Apple. They showed off some stuff that hasn't been showed off in the beta yet and also a really nice demo of Enterprise AR. But the other thing is like oh, he also showed off his Vision Pro cufflinks, which I thought like no, no, no, don't bury the lead. Like did you make those for yourselves? Did you get those on Etsy? Are those commercially available?
1:19:16 - Leo Laporte
Show them if you will. There you go, very nice. Avi Greengard probably will never be invited to another Vision Pro. Oops, I pushed the wrong button. Now I'm in an inception. There we go. Will never be invited to a vision pro demo again. Right, I mean you don't?
1:19:33 - Andy Ihnatko
know those things, they'll, they'll invite them, just just if they bring them extra copies of those cufflinks, those are.
1:19:41 - Jason Snell
it depends because they did this. So on six colorscom not to promote that site again but Dan.
Warren wrote a piece last week about it. They called him down and he visited there and he was able to write about it. It was perfectly fine and it's. This was what they've been trying to do is reach out to people. Apple has a weird thing right when, like Vision OS 2, they talked about it at WWDC there's a developer beta, but like and they know, people talk about the developer betas but they also kind of pretend like they don't. It's very strange, right. And so what they did here is they did an event or a series of briefings, individual briefings with people, where they walk through a bunch of stuff about what is on VisionOS 2 in the developer beta and what is coming, and Dan got a big you know, a big preview of it himself. So you know they're out there doing this. They're trying to spread the word about VisionOS 2. But it's funny because you could also just get the developer beta and see most of this. Apple has its own strategies.
1:20:38 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, dan got to spend some time with this, so this is stuff that's available in the developer beta.
1:20:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, some of it wasn't.
1:20:43 - Leo Laporte
Like Hotted Chess.
1:20:45 - Jason Snell
That's pretty cool, I think some of it was new apps and other stuff. And yeah, enterprise, um, you know, enterprise focused applications. Where they want to show it, it's you got to give them credit. They are continuing to talk about vision pro and vision OS and get people, analysts, press, whatever involved in in in the discussion about it. So it's not, you know, radio silence or anything like that.
1:21:08 - Leo Laporte
But I did find it a little curious. Did Dan get the vision pro cufflinks?
1:21:13 - Jason Snell
no, certainly not, and Dan doesn't have a Vision Pro, so it was also just a good excuse for Dan to spend time in the Vision Pro, so he knows about it more. Yes, the six colors budget will cover one Vision Pro, but it will not cover two, sorry, do you think that?
1:21:26 - Andy Ihnatko
do you think, in this journalistic economy, that we can afford shirts with French cuffs to begin with?
1:21:31 - Leo Laporte
no, that's a good point you have to have french cuffs to even make sense, unless some guy died and they wound up at the salvation army store. I'm not wearing french cuffs if you see avi green guard on the street, you pull them over and ask to see his cufflinks, because those are sweet. I would.
1:21:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I would wear those I really, I really should message him and ask where did you get the cufflinks? Someone must have asked him.
1:21:53 - Alex Lindsay
I only have French cufflinks for my dress shirts.
1:21:56 - Leo Laporte
Come on, you're wearing a work shirt. Don't give us that.
1:21:58 - Alex Lindsay
For my dress shirts. I buy dress shirts, oh dress shirts. I don't like that. Anyway, it's a long story.
1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
I have buttons on my cuffs like a real working class dude.
1:22:14 - Andy Ihnatko
See this pin that once held a pile as big as your eye. Now look at me.
1:22:18 - Alex Lindsay
I'm wearing a cardboard belt, by the way, I had, uh, thank you for those of you who do have a vision pro, we will give you another excuse to put it on. Uh, next tuesday, uh, at three o'clock, we're gonna do a live stream with stream with the Verve Pipe at the record plant and we're going to stream it. This time it'll have production audio, so we'll get that working. But the band's going to go through their entire Villains disc, which is what they recorded at the record plant, and answer questions and so on and so forth.
1:22:46 - Leo Laporte
You will need the Stream.
1:22:48 - Alex Lindsay
Voodoo Spatial app. Right? Yes, you want to go to stream voodoocom slash spatial and make sure that we have you on the list and we'll send you a link that you can go watch it. But sign up now for that. But that's stream voodoocom slash spatial and not special.
1:23:03 - Leo Laporte
You can sign up and they send it to you pretty quick. Mark Marcello says he'll send it to me right away and you'll probably see some.
1:23:12 - Alex Lindsay
We may do some other tests between now and then that we may make available to everyone to see what we're working on and everything else. But but next, next Tuesday, it'll be the first time I think we've ever done anything. I don't think anybody's ever done anything like this. So we're going to see how it, how it goes, so, but we're pretty, we're pretty excited about it's in the Studio B of the record plant. Oh nice, so it should be, and we'll be streaming to YouTube as well.
1:23:33 - Leo Laporte
Legendary recording studio.
1:23:34 - Alex Lindsay
That's nice. We'll stream it to YouTube as well, but there'll be a stream there that's available for Apple Vision Pro. Since we're talking about Apple Vision Pro, and who's the band? Again, it's the Verve Pipe. They were known for a song called Freshman in the 90eties and, as well as photograph, um, uh, brian Van Der Ark is the lead singer and he's done some stuff on his own. Colorful is another, another single that they had. Incredible band and just couldn't be better guys. So a really really good band and, um, and friends of mine, so I, I, uh, so we. It turned out because they were playing in Mill Valley. They're playing at a Sweetwater the next day, and so I noticed that there was. I saw their schedule. I noticed there was a day between when they arrive and when they play and I was like, hey, why don't we fill that day with more work? So they were open to it. So so we're gonna, um, so it should. It should be a fun show, so stay tuned uh, good news.
1:24:25 - Leo Laporte
If you're in california, uh, you can. Now or soon, we'll be able to put your driver's license in your apple and Google wallets by the way.
1:24:34 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. I you know, my driver's license is one of the few things that I have left that I actually need to carry with my phone Well, almost everything with my phone and it's bad news you still have to carry it.
1:24:49 - Leo Laporte
California says they'll be authorized for use in tsa screening. Select apps, select businesses such as circle k, uh, sfo, sjc and lax. What about?
1:25:00 - Alex Lindsay
bevmo, bevmo. That's the only reason I need my license.
1:25:03 - Leo Laporte
On a day-to-day basis is like I need to go and they say you should still carry your driver's license because law enforcement in fact does not have a way to validate that.
1:25:14 - Jason Snell
So, um, I don't know how useful this all is california has had a digital driver's license for some time the idea here is that the they're they're going to be an apple wallet. They're already, I think, five states participating in that and there are.
I think the best way this will work is at the security line at certain airports. You'll be able to basically tap your phone and get that information, although you know it depends. Some different airports have different security requests as well. But yeah, that's the idea, and the idea is that in the long run there will be a agreed upon system and everybody will get on board and you'll be able to tap your phone. You don't have to show them the screen. You get to choose what you share, so you don't have to share a lot of like specific information with them. It's just sort of a verification of your identity, and you can choose to share your age and have that be verified if you're buying alcohol, and then that's the idea.
But it's going to be a slow rollout because again, you're talking about every single place where somebody might want to see an id and all the technology that is or isn't present in those events, but still it's. I mean california. Their app is also very bad, but this is good in that that you'll be able to just put it in the wallet, although even then, my understanding is that there's like a renewal period. So like after a month or three months or something you have to go, go back and yeah with the California license app.
1:26:33 - Leo Laporte
When I got a new phone I had to redo the whole thing. It was a real pain in the neck.
1:26:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a start and we'll see where it goes. And it always felt as Californians, I think the home of Silicon Valley it felt kind of embarrassing that this state was that far behind on this, that Arizona's in there but California is not. So take that Arizona.
1:26:53 - Leo Laporte
And this caveat from Axios Californians who had a driver's license to their Apple or Google wallets must still carry their physical ID card, as required by law.
1:27:04 - Andy Ihnatko
And also remember that most all these digital licensing, digital license features that are going state to state to state, almost none of them require they're built on the understanding that you, the officer who wants to check your license, can check it without taking possession of your phone. Yes, so if an officer decides to be kind of clever and say, oh, we got your digital license, just give me your phone and I'll check it. I have to go back to the car to check it. He asked permission to have your phone. You willingly gave it over, which means that they could do a dump. If they want to Just remember to put your rights on, they do take your driver's license, the whole idea is this is actually an NFC ID system.
1:27:48 - Jason Snell
It's a tap to present information that the interface is supposed to let you choose what you share with them. So it's actually in some ways it could potentially be more private, whereas you've got all that information on the front of your card. If all you're doing is doing an age verification at BevMo and they've got this system set up, which they don't right now, you could say just share my age tap. They don't get to see any of your other information on your card or your driver's license number or anything.
1:28:15 - Leo Laporte
And of course we're way behind. As Rolf in our Discord Club TWiT Discord says in Norway we have a driver's license app. No need to bring the card anymore. And MoreUp says same thing for Denmark.
1:28:28 - Jason Snell
You know the story here. It's absolutely true. I will say again this is what I said when all the Europeans talked to me about contactless payments in the US is the United States is enormous, it's enormous and it's 50 states, so there is not a unified system. For most stuff, it's the individual state governments and, unlike a very densely populated Europe, you have a lot of places that are out in the middle of nowhere where there's nobody, and then there's a gas station or something, and there are so many of those. So the sheer number of anything that you have to replace with a new technology is so enormous and the political structure is so fractured because of the 50 states, it's very difficult. It's a much bigger problem. Not that it's an excuse, but I'm just saying all of these rollouts are exponentially harder in the US than they are in Europe, and so, yes, every time I go to Europe, I'm like, wow, this is pretty awesome.
1:29:26 - Leo Laporte
But again, US has and, by the way–.
1:29:28 - Jason Snell
You're in North Dakota somewhere. You're up in the mountains in Colorado, somewhere. It's like there's nobody.
1:29:33 - Andy Ihnatko
There's like 10 people in a cow. We have a state that's bigger than your whole country, that has all the stuff you're asking for.
1:29:39 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, yeah. And, by the way, that one gas station in between the uh, las vegas, in the desert, between las vegas and los angeles, is charging more than eight dollars a gallon for gas, because where else you gonna go?
1:29:52 - Jason Snell
yeah, right, yeah, that's just america I think a lot of a lot of market a lot of europeans especially, just don't understand the wide open empty spaces problem with America. They come to San Francisco and they're like ah day trip to. La. I'm like well, it's six hours that way, Right.
So that's that is I mean. And with contactless payment, that was a huge problem. It's like the number of terminals you have to swap out to get it to work and we've basically done it, but it takes will. It takes a real financial motivation, because also that gas station in the middle of nowhere doesn't want to spend three thousand dollars on new technology or or the ga you know they. So it's hard, it's a hard problem. I'm glad that they've started this. It's going to take forever but right after this a gallon in europe.
1:30:34 - Leo Laporte
So they, they, at least that's. Uh, we have that in common. Cedric cron in our youtube chat says we can't even get people to use different passwords or password managers and they're going to adopt digital driver's licenses.
1:30:45 - Alex Lindsay
Good luck.
1:30:46 - Leo Laporte
Good luck with that.
1:30:48 - Alex Lindsay
I think this is going to open the door to metric. I think that metric is next.
1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
It's just the beginning, isn't it, Alex? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:30:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't take that picture away from us, Alex.
1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
We're proud of it. I tried to just switch to metric. I'm gonna do everything in metric, like when, I was like 19 and after about two years I just gave up metric wrenches. They don't fit nothing. No, I just say hey, I am informed that we neglected to play the vision pro closing theme, even though we in fact have run out of people to know that we were still we're, we're that's not so.
1:31:18 - Jason Snell
Go ahead, hit the vision pro you know we're done talking the Vision Pro, we were done. Just said we're done immediately. We were done, we were done, we're done Poor. John.
1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
Ashley just sitting with his finger hovering over the button, your finger a little sore now. Yeah, big deal on iPads. This is good news. The ninth generation ipad is down to 199 nice uh on amazon and uh, best buy. I don't know if that heralds a new ipad coming any minute or just I don't know what. It's the lowest price, according to apple insider, they've ever seen on record yeah, I actually had to remind myself.
1:32:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I said, well, at that price, let's just buy one and figure out if we need one later. No, let's not. That is one hell of a great price.
1:32:08 - Leo Laporte
It's 64 gig storage and Wi-Fi only, but you know what?
1:32:10 - Andy Ihnatko
That's fine as a reader yeah, as a reader and as a backseat device, that's more than plenty.
1:32:17 - Leo Laporte
So this is being discontinued? Is that the reason for the price drop?
1:32:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah I mean there's already a 10th generation model and the rumor has it that they'll do an 11th and the 9th will get bumped off the bottom. So it's at the end. I mean it's really already been replaced, but they still classic Tim Cook. They're still offering the previous gen model at a cut rate price.
1:32:44 - Andy Ihnatko
And now, yeah, this is the last stop before it gets off the price list. This is the last, this is the last, last active ipad.
1:32:47 - Leo Laporte
I think this has a that big forehead and that big chin from day one. So, yeah, yeah, a home button. Yeah, wow. Could it ever be the case that the home button would stop working?
1:32:52 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, because, yeah, yeah, well, only because, like people, you people use it while they're eating people there no, no, no.
1:33:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean like that Apple would deprecate it in the software.
1:33:05 - Jason Snell
Well, no, I mean, they'll support it until the moment in which they're not supporting any of the home button devices anymore, which will be a while, because they're still selling that one now.
1:33:13 - Leo Laporte
Right, that gives you a few years anyway. And if you use Apple Podcasts, I know a lot of people do Good news there. And if you use Apple Podcasts, I know a lot of people do Good news there is now a web version. I had no idea there wasn't. Wow, they're catching up with Pocket Casts so you can subscribe. You can listen, works in Chrome, edge, firefox and Safari in 170 countries. Great, fantastic.
1:33:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Welcome to the 21st century isn't, but isn't it interesting that that comes right on the heels of apple maps for web? Yeah, it seems.
I mean it's, it's like. I mean it seems like something. You're right. You would have to be reminded they haven't been doing that all along. I wonder if that's. I wonder if that points to something in the future that's going to benefit from having lots of web presence, or if they're just simply as a matter of policy, acknowledging that here's how many people, how many of our users, have an iPad but they have a Windows machine, or they have an iPhone but they have a Windows machine, or they have an Android phone and a MacBook. And allows any time we can get an incursion into, set our hooks into their hearts a little bit deeper, even if it's just on this one issue of podcasts. Why wouldn't we do that? Yeah, maybe this didn't have the capability, the, the, the, the server power, their server resources to spend on something like that. But I don't know. Someone, someone won an argument, finally, I think, inside.
1:34:41 - Leo Laporte
And I inside, and I know there's some podcasts that say don't use apple podcasts. But jason and I agree there's nothing wrong with apple podcasts and if they cancel the subscription because you haven't listened in a few weeks, fine, right, yeah? Yeah, I mean it's.
1:34:52 - Jason Snell
It's. It's a good app. It's everywhere. It doesn't have some I don't. I mean I use overcast and not apple podcast because I I like some of the features in overcast but apple podcasts it keeps getting better and so now there's a web version, so that solves that problem if you're on your windows pc at work or whatever and you want to find that spot in your in your podcast. And yeah, in terms of their policy it's, it's kind of hard to say how dare they stop endlessly downloading episodes of a podcast that nobody's listening to? I mean really yeah.
1:35:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you understand that a large number of podcasts saw a drop of 20 or 30% in their downloads because of that. And they were understandably disappointed, but nobody was listening, so why were you counting?
1:35:38 - Jason Snell
It doesn't change the number of people who were actually listening and it rewards the podcast where the people are actually listening and I mean I get it and I get that if you're banking on that number and that number changes. I mean this keeps happening in the podcasting industry, right? I mean we had that the IAB rules came in and they keep changing the rules and, like, what a podcast listen is is very difficult to define, keep changing the rules and like what a podcast listen is is very difficult to define. But I do think it's hard. Like I said, I get the pain of it. It's just hard to argue, like how dare you not count the numbers of people who don't listen?
1:36:10 - Leo Laporte
I mean so you and I, you and I have integrity. We only want to count the people who, uh, listen. It's podcast numbers are very strange. I mean we see shows go up 30 one week, down 30 another week.
1:36:25 - Jason Snell
It's a very all over the place and I don't, I don't, I don't know why that's why the best, the best ads and podcasts are from advertisers who see the effect of the podcast right because that's the truth of it is, if you're, if you're an advertiser and you're buying a number and this is what happens at agencies they just are buying a number.
They do. They do that. But the truth is, when you have a good relationship with an advertiser, they're like oh, when we advertise on Mac break weekly, we get response and it's like that's what they're buying. Is the actual response Not a vague number? That may or may not mean anything, but unfortunately, when you industrialize advertising as we know that they've done with so much of the podcast industry you get to the point where it is a number and that's when you're like yeah, maybe we could count, get that person who's not. I mean, technically, our file is on their iPhone, so maybe we should count them.
1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
We actually have agencies that buy shows by name only, and so they, uh, sometimes won't buy this show because they say, well, only Apple people listen to this show, and it's actually not the case at all. A lot of IT people who have decision making responsibility in every arena.
1:37:32 - Jason Snell
Apple people means the iPhone, which is the most popular consumer. Yeah, right.
1:37:36 - Alex Lindsay
I do think that this is probably Apple saying we don't want to develop on windows anymore, we're just going to keep on making web apps.
1:37:42 - Leo Laporte
You know like we're going to make some web somebody in the in the youtube chat says it's uh, actually it was in discord, but uh, joe said, we're quote, we're not any competitive. We have web apps. What lock in?
1:37:55 - Alex Lindsay
well, but I think I think it also is just just you know, they're doing what a lot of other companies do, which is is like I don't want to build a native, like Apple has a native platform. They're going to build native things for that, and then you have a web version.
1:38:07 - Leo Laporte
And it's always the case, the native version is better, right? I mean, that's what Facebook did with its first. Always, people said, oh, that's not, you need a native app. Yeah.
1:38:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But there's an in-between where, my God, if you ever looked at the technically yeah, there was a Safari for Windows. Yeah, technically, there's music for this platform, but it's so badly done, it's not done with any sort of delicacy or primacy, that, yeah, if they were to say, I would be 100% in favor of Apple saying, well, yeah, we're obviously going to be putting our full creativity and our full efforts towards the iOS native app, but we are going to keep a web version of it as feature complete as we can and we are going to keep updating it. That's kind of a win, although it's still kind of weird. I haven't checked in a little bit to see if Apple Maps is working on phones yet. It was very, very weird. When it launched, it didn't work on Android phones. It does work on Chrome. It's not a renderer problem. But that would indicate that they don't want, either they feel as though they haven't properly transmogrified the web interface to look good on mobile yet, or there's a reason why they're holding off, at least immediately. That's.
1:39:22 - Leo Laporte
That's weird uh, also, speaking of the iphone, uh, the first indian made iphone pro models are coming this year for the first time ever. Oh, yeah, I said india. Did I say the word india? Yeah, important to say that for the first time ever, uh, apple will be assembling, foxconn will be assembling iphone pros. Uh, in india, um, they've begun training thousands of workers in northern tamil nadu state as they rush to produce the iphone 16 pro and pro max as close to the global debut as possible. It might be a couple of weeks after the debut. That's important because of tariffs. Is that why they're doing that?
1:40:06 - Andy Ihnatko
It's important because of tariffs, of being able to sell in India. It's important because they're wanting to have more diverse manufacturing, of course, and it's also a really good positive mark for Indian manufacturing that they are not just doing low end stuff, that they are doing Like here's the prime, here's the most expensive, most tricky, most. We have the platform, we have had the least amount of experience in manufacturing and you get to manufacture just on the same level as anybody else.
1:40:34 - Leo Laporte
All right, I think, unless I've missed something, we've hit all of the highlights of this week's. Well, I didn't mention the new iPhone 16 is coming in bronze, maybe.
1:40:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, is it Zune Brown? I think best case scenario it's Zune Brown. Worst case scenario, best case scenario, it's tan.
1:40:55 - Leo Laporte
Either way, not feeling great. It's called Desert Titanium.
1:40:59 - Jason Snell
Desert Titanium, to go with all the other titanium. That is hideous.
1:41:03 - Andy Ihnatko
That's definitely pulled out of the riverbed after a year of color.
1:41:09 - Jason Snell
Photos often don't do these things colors especially justice. But I'm given pause that they're replacing the dark blue, which is what I have and I think is actually very nice, with something that could be best described as an earth tone have, and I think is actually very nice, with something that could be best best described as an earth tone. But you know, I I have a long relationship that is very critical with Apple and whoever is choosing the colors over there I always call it that person. The colors are, the colors are is, I don't know. They keep them locked up somewhere where they can't see the Sun or the sky or maybe colors, and they say, hey, you know what pros want. Pros want dark phones that have no color, and so why not a tan phone? I mean, why Go ahead? Apple Tan phone, sure, whatever. It'll go well with leather.
Oh wait, you don't sell leather accessories anymore.
1:41:57 - Andy Ihnatko
No, and I understand why you want to go for conservative colors, because those are the ones that sell best. Also, if I were buying a phone, I'd be concerned about resale, and if I want to be flashy and pink and super, super lime green, I would just buy a case and put it on there. But it is kind of cool when you see that, like the Google Pixels, like not the Pixel 9, the pink it is pink with a capital P, it is not like halfway, and that's that's kind of I really wish that they would have. Apple would decide every year. Every year we're going to have one colorway that is just so intense that it is going to be a choice to go for this colorway, and I would love to see that, because this, the choice of color, would be something kind of amazing yeah, all I want is choice.
1:42:45 - Jason Snell
I don't want apple to say look, if you want to buy an iphone pro, it comes in bright pink or bright green, and those are your only choices right, I don't want that. There's always going to be black and white and gray, but don't you put in a case really, let's be honest. I mean I, I don't, I'm, I'm, I, I'm caseless, I'm absolutely caseless. You're raw dogging it. Wow, you got to. Yeah, you got to. I don't want a case. Why do you got to? I don't.
1:43:08 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think it's a beautiful object You've got to be in a minority aren't you?
1:43:12 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't know, I'm just so clumsy. I probably drop my phone a couple of times a week and I look at it and go wow, I really had.
1:43:21 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad I had a case Plus for the case you can vary your colors.
1:43:23 - Alex Lindsay
My daughter, my daughter she's like she was talking about her phone working and she showed me the case and literally the entire back. She's got a. She's in a case. The only thing is holding that phone together is the is the case.
1:43:44 - Leo Laporte
I use uh. Thanks to you, alex, I got the uh. This is the peak design case which I had. It's funny I've gone through. I remember I was doing wallet cases for a while, but this uh, because the magnet is in addition to the magsafe.
1:43:51 - Alex Lindsay
It's much stronger, that's the whole thing for me is that stick my wallet on that do you use the little thing that goes into your on your car?
1:43:58 - Leo Laporte
that, yeah, well I don't need on my car, but I have a variety of places that I I thwack my phone too. So, yeah, I really like this. And now I realize, because I have all the accessories, all I have to do is buy a new case when a new phone comes out, and then everything works, because they're keeping this, this, this little hole kind of fits the tripod.
1:44:16 - Alex Lindsay
for the tripod mount it works great. And then for the one on my car, it just, you know, it's got this weird little hook that goes into your vent. You can tighten it up and it holds it to that vent really solidly and it's both in my car and my wife's car and, man, it's great.
1:44:33 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to have to pay attention as I walk around to see, but my sense is that almost everybody has a case. But my sense is that almost everybody has a case.
1:44:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I rarely see a blank phone out there and, again, I think I take really good care of my phones, but it's the cases so that I can be totally irresponsible. I had this phone for a month, month and a half, and I forget what the situation is, but I was putting my backpack back on, forgot that, for whatever reason, I had my phone in a top pocket of the backpack and it was unzipped and because I swung my backpack off, it just went whee and I landed a certain distance on the sidewalk and I'm like, well, six weeks, that was fun, a $1,200 phone and it was perfectly fine. And I'm sure that would not have been the case if it were not in a case.
1:45:20 - Alex Lindsay
Well and again I. The very first thing I do is I put one of the glass things across the front, I put it in a case and it just slowly wears out. But every year when I cause, I hand my phones, you know, down the down the pipe, family pipeline I get to hand my wife a pristine last year's version.
1:45:38 - Andy Ihnatko
See, that's a lesson that I learned late. I have never, ever, ever ever gotten a single scratch on any of my iPhones, any of my Android phones, until this one. I don't know what happened, but it was such a deep scratch that my fingernail could even get caught in it if I'm swiping, and that taught me that, okay, from now on, whenever we buy a new phone phone, we do not take it out of the store before putting a protector on the screen.
1:46:03 - Alex Lindsay
And, by the way, if you buy the protector at the apple store, they have a super cool machine that they use to put it on like. It's way different than when you put it on at home. At home it's a little stressful for me. The apple one you hand them the phone, you hand it, you buy the screen protector and they've got the. It reminds me of the old credit card, uh things.
1:46:20 - Leo Laporte
When we were kids it was like you know, it's like that, but it puts the screen on and it's great cool uh, by the way, speaking of india, according to the rest of world, which is, by the way, a fantastic website, yeah, yeah, for international coverage, apple's biggest competition in India is Apple used iPhones. We give them the same phone in the same brand new condition, says one seller. Yeah, you know, that makes sense.
1:46:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah because the one of the reasons why Apple has interest in in India? For a couple of reasons. Number one, because they haven't sold a lot of iPhones there yet and if they're going to continue to make Bank, if the iPhone is going to continue to make bank, if the iphone is going to going to continue to be worth half of their business, they are going to find people who don't haven't bought iphones yet and sell them iphones they're getting. That's necessary. And also, as an economist explained to me, a lot of like a lot of the middle class revolution that happened in china like 10 or 15 years ago, is starting to happen in india. So apple has the expectation that there are going to be a lot more consumers who can afford a non-budget or economy phone.
Unfortunately, right now that's still the primary market. A new iPhone is still kind of an aspirational object, and so that's why Apple's doing almost negligible numbers against almost any Android manufacturer who can give them a decent, very, very cheap phone that almost anybody can buy. And why, and because apparently there are regulations against importing importing secondhand iPhones for the secondhand market into India. Essentially, it means that once an iPhone gets in there, it becomes a very, very hot commodity as a way to get a budget version of an iPhone. So yeah, it's very, very price sensitive and it's something that Apple's going to have to be chipping against if they want to continue to make headway there.
1:48:08 - Leo Laporte
Finally, I forgot to mention the big rumor of the week Apple's HomePod with a little robotic arm to steer it. Hi, I'm Jibo, only not quite so friendly. Yeah, it reminds me of the jibo.
1:48:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, like, uh, like uh, maybe you look like the g4 iMac a little bit. Yeah, it's like an ipad size screen on an arm with a homepod base. That, uh, apparently mark german says is being, you know, put, if not put into production, put into active design, that they're gonna do this thing. And he keeps calling it a robot, which is very silly, yeah, but, um, that might no, because amazon makes an alexa that does exactly this.
1:48:46 - Leo Laporte
It it turns to face you. Yeah, it follows you around if you're on a call. Yeah, um, I presume, but they do it without an arm yeah.
1:48:55 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean, yeah, I think that they want to. They want to pivot, or maybe they don't rotate the base but they rotate the arm. I don't't know. What troubles me about this report is that Mark Gurman is saying that they think that it might cost $1,000. And I have that HomePod or Vision Pro vibe, which is, guys, I know you can make the most ultra-premium version of this product and put it in the kitchen. What if you made—it's okay, like, it's okay to just— look, I had an Echo Show, I have a Google Nest Home.
Let me tell you, the opportunity for Apple to ship something that's basically like those but vastly better, is there. It would not. It is not a high bar to clear and it would be a shame if, instead of making a product that's like those but better and uses Apple's ecosystem which they've got all the pieces already that they would instead be. But what if we built a robot arm and it was a thousand dollars and it blew everybody's minds? It's like well, that's great, but like, who's going to buy that? Versus a 500 or 700 or whatever the price is? Maybe lower your expectations a little. That cause, like I said, I think, as an aficionado of these kind of products. I think the bar is real low, like I think amazon is full of junk because they're trying to sell you stuff and the google stuff. Google's really inattentive, uh, and it's those products are really slow and they don't get updated very often, like apple could slide on in there and I hope they don't blow it by aspiring to build a ridiculous product.
1:50:20 - Andy Ihnatko
That's Bang Olufsen style stuff where, yeah, they're beautiful static objects. You go into the store and you admire it, but it's like it's just a normal thing, with this design quirk in it that makes it look cool and makes it cost four times as much. I'm glad I stopped in the mall to take a look at it, but there's no reason to buy it. It's just a fribble. The only way I was thinking about this, about how this could be an interesting thing to do Now, to make a screen that's motorized and so it can swivel and pivot and aim itself. Obviously all the demo videos will be oh no, look, hey look. My granddaughter is walking around the room during our FaceTime call, but I can still see her because it's tracking her.
1:51:07 - Leo Laporte
Facebook already did this, Andy. That's the Facebook portal and it was for grandma and grandpa.
1:51:14 - Andy Ihnatko
But that's the obvious video is to say well, how about we do? Apple has an amazingly high, respected reputation for privacy and security. What if there were a home security product that was operated by the one brand that you might trust it to have unlimited camera access to a room of your house? Not only that, but unlimited power to process that with AI and remember what it's seen. So I'm not talking about hey, there's somebody in your house and they seem to be a burglar. I'm talking about the ability to ask hey, shlomo, did my dog eat today? Say, yes, your dog ate. What time? They ate a full bowl at 3.12 PM and then again like at 4.12. And it knows that only because it knows that there's a dog in a room. It was tracking it when it went in. It knows what a dog dish looks like. It knows what a dog eating out of that dish looks like. So, even though you didn't have to set up a shortcut to do so, you can ask it relevant questions like is it, is it cloudy at home?
1:52:24 - Leo Laporte
we had an advertiser that made a device like this and it went out of business. Yeah, it didn't sell. I have the device, kind of a orphaned device, in my collection. I I don't know if it's the privacy angle or just the creepy angle. I don't know if we're suddenly I think it's the privacy, angle I mean, I think that's what really really. I think it really hammered the the portal.
1:52:47 - Alex Lindsay
The portal had a lot of advantages. Um yeah, well, I didn't want a meta device.
1:52:50 - Leo Laporte
I agree 100 right but it was a really I, even if it's apple, you know I have uh, ubiquity has cameras and that they don't ever leave the house, the internet, you know I they're never stored anywhere except in my own server, um, but even then I think it's nobody. People don't like the idea of cameras in the house, I think I think I'm pretty sensitive, like I don't.
1:53:13 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit I don't have the amazon or google stuff in my house, but I do have a. I do have the home pod the big, the original one in my kitchen and it's used all day, every day, but I don't feel comfortable with other devices in my house, would you?
1:53:26 - Leo Laporte
have a device that had a camera on it in your house.
1:53:31 - Alex Lindsay
In the kitchen I think I could do it. I mean in the kitchen, yeah, you would. Yeah, and I think I do it because if I got one for my wife or my mother-in or her, her mother, they would probably use it two or three hours a day. I mean, they talk a lot, you know, and so they. And so the the the problem for me is that I don't really want to think about the. For me, I wouldn't use it as much because when I'm in the kitchen I kind of don't want people to be watching me cut vegetables or while I'm talking on the phone really want that.
But I think I do think the swivel makes a difference.
I think one of the problems with the portal or with any of these the idea that you could do a 4K and then do a 720, punch in and move around the problem was is there's just a lot of places you get off access and you can't get there, you know.
And so being able to move around and look at what people are doing in a larger room makes a big difference, big difference, and I think for telepresence it could make a difference where you know you could do things like put it in a conference room, it's not just kitchens, but it's put in a conference room and it looks at the person who's, you know, doing it, and there are cameras out there that do that right now. But it might be nice to just be able to pop your iPad up and do it as well for something that's smaller. So I think there's some. I do think that a thousand dollars is pretty rich. I don't think I even I would probably buy it, um, but you know, five or $600, I think it starts to get into a range where you get a larger market.
1:54:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's. That's why I find it interesting, if I definitely not trust Facebook, might trust Google only in the only. In the sense that, again, it's not that I necessarily think they're necessary they're a hell of a lot more trustworthy than any other company that collects data of its scale. It's just that I'm already kind of all in on Google. So in for a penny, in for a pound.
1:55:06 - Leo Laporte
They already know everything about you, Andy, so might as well give them a video.
1:55:11 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's why I find it interesting to think of well, what if Apple? Apple is the one company I think could make that case that look, we're going to start off by showing you the you know, the big reveal. It's in shadow, and then it's, and then it's in spotlights and then it's rotating. But before we get into features, we're going to explain to you exactly how impossible it is for any anybody, including apple, to to be spying on you or to be collecting information about you. That the ai that is trained, the things that the AI learns, is kept on device. It's in a secure enclave. It cannot be accessed by anybody else. If that would be kind of interesting, but I think you're right like not for a thousand dollars, for like five or six hundred dollars maybe.
1:55:54 - Leo Laporte
Stephen Riddell, watching us on Xcom, says I feel like Apple is just a lifestyle brand. People like to promulgate this notion that Apple's pro-consumer, with their focus on privacy, but Lewis Rossman has been pointing out for 10 years they don't care about you. Lewis Rossman, of course is the right to repair guy Oppose any attempt to improve rights and value to customers. Your privacy matters only as far as it's part of their marketing design language and would be dropped as soon as it's financially advantageous to do so. This is the contrarian point.
1:56:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I just quickly agree with what you're saying there, because?
1:56:30 - Leo Laporte
their principle is to make money.
1:56:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Their principle is that they have a business plan and every single moral choice they make is applied against. Does this mess with our business plan, or does this not?
1:56:39 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't Great, we'll put on the halo, we'll be the champions, for this is the one of the things that's really changed is ai and the and the and the. It is a rapacious uh maw of data that is swallowing everything it possibly can, and if apple's going to do ai, which it obviously wants to, your data is absolutely going to be grist for the mill.
1:57:02 - Alex Lindsay
You actually don't know, we don't actually know that. No and that's not at all what their strategy is. Their whole point is that your information is not grist.
1:57:09 - Leo Laporte
You're very trusting. That's all I could say. No, no.
1:57:13 - Jason Snell
I'd say there's nuance there that that commenter is not sharing. Apple is not a charity. Apple is a publicly held company that's trying to make as much profit as possible, and that's true. But when you say, but they don't actually, they don't actually have any standards or priorities, I think that that's also BS and it's a typical argument that I've always heard about Apple. And the fact is, yes, apple does things that are self serving.
However, apple and Apple leans into things that its business model allows it to lead into that also differentiate it from some of its competitors and, at this point, the respecting people's data, because they didn't build their business on advertising and sharing data like Google, did you know? Did they do that because it was the right thing to do? Well, no, they did it because they were a hardware company that also bundles up. But here we are right, and so it is a trait of Apple. Whether we Apple's first off, apple's not a person so like. Does it believe it or not? Is it a profit seeking company? It absolutely is. But I think it is a trait and a strategy of Apple to go in this direction. And you know, you can say yeah, but look at right to repair, it's like yes, it is a big, complicated profit making company and there are places where it emphasizes and there are places where it doesn't. It also takes tries to take 30% from Patreon creators, I mean it's complicated is what I'm saying.
It's complicated.
1:58:25 - Alex Lindsay
And I don't think that the I really don't think right to repair is really connected to profit as much as it is. Apple wants to innovate and doesn't want to have to deal with backwards compatibility or or deal with anything having to. We don't want to build things that we have to take apart Like that's, I think, apple, I think Apple doesn't. It's not a matter of like, oh, we're making a bunch of money on these parts, like that's not the deal, like I think that Apple just doesn't want to deal with that. They don't want that part of the one of the variables that they're figuring out. You know, they just want to make the best phone they can make.
I mean, when you talk to folks at Apple, a lot of they don't want to be, they don't want to be encumbered, and so so the.
But I think that the. As far as the privacy thing, sure, maybe they drop it if it wasn't profitable, but it's always going to be profitable because no one else can do it, like no one else can do what Apple's doing because there's a, there are vertical, they're vertically integrated and as long as they, you know. So privacy is going to be profitable for Apple and is going to be a differentiator for as long as the company probably exists, you know. And so because that vertical integration is extremely difficult to reproduce with a heterogeneous mix of companies and technologies, and so, yeah, so you know, I'm not saying that they're a good company or bad company, or that what's good or good or bad. It is a profitable thing to do, but I don't think it's going away anytime soon and I think they're going to keep doubling down on it because it's the thing that makes them different, or one of the things that makes them very different from everybody else.
1:59:48 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break when we come back. Your picks of the week, my fellow mecker breakers, our show today, brought to you by our fabulous club TWiT members. You've heard me plug club to it many, many times, uh, and I hope that you've listened, you've heeded the call and joined the club. But if you haven't, we would love to have you. It's seven bucks a month. We try to, we really try hard to keep the price low, although I do lately hear people say, okay, can we give you more? And yes, you can. Uh and uh, I should say not give you more because it doesn't go into my pocket. I want to really emphasize this, lisa, and I don't take money out of the club. The club goes to support the operation, the salaries of the 10, 15 people who work here, the 20 or 30 contributors who join the shows every week. That's where the money goes. And if you like what you're hearing and if you want to hear more of it, the best way to do that is to vote with your pocketbook and go to twittv slash club TWiT. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club TWiT discord. You get special events, not just on the air but also in person. You get a lot of benefits, but the biggest benefit is you're supporting, uh, our, our efforts going forward. Advertising sales have really dwindled and we and we need to make it up somehow. We've, we've done our part. We closed the studio. That's going to save us a huge amount of money, uh, but we need your support to keep going. Twittv, slash club twit. That's all.
I'm not going to go on and on. I don't want to beg, um, let us get our picks of the week. I'm going to start it off because I'm not going to go on and on. I don't want to beg, um, let us get our picks of the week. I'm going to start it off because I saw an article about this and I thought this was very cool.
Before there was tech tv, before there was computer chronicles, there was a southern california radio show from 1983 through early 86 called the famous computer cafe. They recorded all their shows on reel-to-reel tape, many of which have been lost. But uh, interestingly, a computer archivist named k sabbats bought a bunch of the reel-to-reels at auction and has digitized them and put them on the internet archive. So this is a time capsule from the earliest days of computing, the very first one I listened to was an interview with Bill Atkinson in 1985, one year after the Macintoshes release. Bill Gates is on here. He's less than 30. Douglas Adams Many of the people that we know and love.
Larry Magid is on here. Stephen Levy is on here. There are two interviews with timothy larry. Uh, this is a really fun time capsule. There's another one with bill atkinson later, so if you want to check it out, it's all available now. Uh, the ones that exist. I mean, there are many more shows than this. Unfortunately, many of them, I think, are going to be lost, but thanks to k savitz, who saved these and has posted them. There's a Gene Roddenberry interview. Internet Archive Search for Famous Computer Cafe. If you love this stuff, it's fun to hear the old commercials too for Microsoft Office and things like that. You can type or you can use a mouse with Microsoft Word. Andy Anotko pick of the week.
2:03:06 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick is a podcast and a couple episodes of that podcast. There is a podcast called 20,000 Hertz which I did not know about until a couple of weeks ago. It is 200 episodes so far. It's just a podcast about sounds, not like music, not like music production, just like sounds. Like you'll do an episode about whale sounds OK, and how those are generated, how they propagate design team to have them walk them through.
Like how Apple incorporates sound into products, both today and historically, and the specifics about like what the purposes and the stories behind some of these specific sounds are like the. In episode one, the one that really hooked me, they talked about the, the chime for the first Apple watch, that and that like they want to make sure they. First there was like the like the beard stroking question of well, like a wristwatch that produces like a chime, like what did old watches do? Should it be like more like a modern digital watch? And they and they take you through this, this, this pathway, where they're?
They go from the design studio they get a handful of like empty aluminum cases and they're wrapping them with mallets to figure out do they resonate. And that's how they came up with like the chime, the chime sound, uh, and because this is a podcast you're listening to about sounds, it is so well cut together because when they talk about uh, like developing, like the tritone sound that was, I think, originally for sound jam, which became iTunes, Like when you first, when you finished burning a CD and they wound up using this noise, like elsewhere, like in the modern OS, you got to hear like here are the different iterations they went through Leo, you'll, you'll, you'll enjoy this. Oh, I can't wait to listen.
Cause they had. Cause they had one of the engineers who said well, I wrote this program in Lisp that would just generate sets of tones, and they just listened to these sets of tones over and over again through MIDI. Wow, two episodes. That's great, it's really great stuff. And the whole podcast is great. It's like now we were talking about, like we should, a podcast catcher does you a blessing when it deletes episodes that are old, that you haven't listened to. Like this is now like oh man, now we've got another. I need another eight hours every day because so these are sound guys.
2:05:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it's all about sound, right?
2:05:31 - Andy Ihnatko
it's all about sound and it's probably, and it's esoteric stuff top five.
2:05:36 - Alex Lindsay
top five podcasts that I listen to is oh, this, is000 Hertz, it's just so it's just so entertaining to listen to.
2:05:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
2:05:43 - Alex Lindsay
They did a whole episode on the sound that Tik TOK makes when the video stops. Yes, like at the end, you know, like boom, blame. And they made thousands of them, like thousands of of the of that to get it just right. And they did all this stuff. I mean the stuff, I mean it's, they just it's, oh, it's so good, yeah, it's, it's a really really great, uh great podcast.
2:06:02 - Leo Laporte
I 100 agree, uh, wow I have never heard of it. I'm I'm thrilled to find out at 20korg. 20korg, it'sa. It's a podcast all about sound. Wish I'd thought of that. What a brilliant idea. Super deep, dallas Taylor, very nice, uh. Thank you, Andy, for that recommendation all right. How about you, alex Lindsay? What do you got?
2:06:28 - Alex Lindsay
so, um, you know, constantly working on my diet, you know, trying to trying to figure out what I want to eat and everything else, and I'm slowly winding out a lot of things like meat. So so, um, not completely, but just like I probably can, you know, but trying to figure out what to make and how to make it and everything else. And so I was talking to my cousin who's vegan I'm not, I'm not committed to being vegan, but I am but I was like, oh, I just need to know more about what I can do there. And so he was like he, he, he showed me this library that he has to make the go away.
Like, you know, just just this thing, it's called deliciously Ella and, um, this is an app and I think, even if you're not interested in vegan food, it's just so well-made, you know. So, if you look at this, um, you know you have, uh, you know you have the recipes, but those recipes can be built into, um, very quickly, converted into shopping lists. Uh, they can be converted in. You know that. You can keep track of. You know, it's really well laid out this is great.
2:07:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to recommend this to Lisa she's she and I both want to go more plant based. This is yeah, and this is. I was really like is that Ella?
2:07:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's Ella.
I don't I don't know, though, so but I really matter, all I know is that my cousin, who's been, you know, vegan for eight years or whatever, was like. I have all these books, but this is the only app that I'm using to figure this out, and they just come out with stuff and you just follow, follow the instructions and it comes out great and you know, you don't have to think about it and um and so, but I think it's even again, beyond the um. You know, I started going to one of our, one of our uh uh members of office hours uh Hosmuk, uh um Demiant, um Hosmuk uh Gajar. Uh, his wife, demianti, has a book on on, uh on on vegetarian cooking, and that's what really got me thinking about it.
I realized all these spices and everything else. I don't really know how much I need me to do a lot of these things, and so it started me down this path of this thing, and now I'm now I'm, you know, using this, starting to use this app, and again, it just the hardest part with any of these things, whether it's this or cooking, well, or doing anything else, and I think that you know, cooking food from scratch is a skill that is a pretty important one you know to have, you know, and I think that it's you know, knowing how to, whether it's all vegetarian or or you know whatever it is. You got to stop eating the ultra processed foods, like I have to like.
2:08:39 - Leo Laporte
I've given up. I've been slowly winding up.
2:08:41 - Alex Lindsay
No matter, even however good it is, it is not as good for you I was talking to a nutritionist about it and I said so what's the good uh uh ultra process versus the bad ultra process? They're like it's all cAndy bars. Just just look at it. When you see a box that you can make quickly, it's just a cAndy bar, like it's. You know it has the same effect on your body as a cAndy bar. Like, just think of them as all cAndy bars and then you're. You're much closer to the truth.
And the other thing that I found is that you know you're, you're paying, you know a lot of uh. When you buy something, most of what you're paying for and most of what you're eating is logistics. You know you're eating, what it will last and how long and what it'll do and everything else. You're not really paying for the food, you know. And so over the last couple of years I've really spent a lot of time getting better during COVID, but even after COVID, more intensely, you're going to farmer's markets and getting all this stuff. But learning how to cook it all has been another challenge, so and I've been leaning.
This is adding to what I generally use as ChatGPT for it. So the mixture of Deliciously Ella feels a little more curated than ChatGPT and a lot of stuff is, you know. Really, anyway, it's a really great app and, again, the management of, like you're saying, yeah, I want to do this, and you can check off all the things you don't have, and it immediately makes a list and orders it in the way that it's probably going to show up in the supermarket. Then you can very quickly go through things and buy the things that you need. It's it's uh, it's great, so and really well, well designed.
I hope more people do more I am how, now it's, it says it has in-app purchases yeah, I, it's like a yearly subscription, I think it costs like 30 dollars or something like that for the year, and I and I paid for it so I looked at it right now. Yeah, I was like so, so no, that's all I can say is my, my cousin, my uncle, um uh, lost like 80 pounds in a year on these, on these, on this diet. So you know so and it's not doesn't feel like it's on a diet.
Diet, it's just eating more.
2:10:35 - Leo Laporte
So standard member 699 a month premium member 3299 a month. Premium member $32.99 a year. So if you're a standard member.
2:10:43 - Alex Lindsay
It's cheaper to be a premium member. Exactly no, it's way cheaper. It's like you pay. I was like that's a pretty good business model, like, hey, if you don't want to pay, you only pay every month. We're not going to give you everything and we're also going to charge you a lot more for time, but I think that it's.
2:10:57 - Leo Laporte
It's less than a cookbook. I mean, I buy cookbooks all the time. Exactly, I have a large 5,000 recipes is less than a cookbook. So there you go. Thank you, alex. I guess that only leaves you Jason Snell for your pick of the week.
2:11:11 - Jason Snell
All right, we heard about vegetarian things. Now it's back to the meat and potatoes. Hey, you should back up your mac. How about that? Yes, good thinking. Time machine is nice. Time machine is nice.
Um, backblaze or some other remote backup is also good. A good idea, because a local backup doesn't save you in case of a, like a physical disaster, like your house burning down or a flood. Um, however, one of the things that I've really taken to lately I do those things, but what I also did is I bought an SSD, a Samsung SSD the size of my internal drive on my Mac Studio, plugged it in the back. My Mac Studio is under my desk, so it's actually tucked in right by the Mac Studio. I never even see this drive and I clone it every day.
And there are two great Mac apps that do it. I'm going to mention one that I think is maybe less known these days Pocket, which is the other one, but this one, just as good, just came up with an update. I use them both. I like them both. Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software. Mike Bombich has been making this app for a zillion years. It uses APFS and versioning within APFS, apple's file system, to make it easier to capture different snapshots of your drive at different times.
2:12:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a really good thing.
2:12:32 - Jason Snell
So it will snapshot your drive through time as long as there's space on the drive. But what I do is I run it every day. It runs in the background, I never even notice and what happens is then you have that day where you do an OS update, files disappear or you do a migration and your files disappear. This happened to me and guess what? I have my clone. It's literally all the files from my drive on another drive and it's fairly straightforward to migrate back from that clone. It's also good because you've also just got a clone of your drive.
I've had those moments where I thought you know, I need to copy these 8,000 files to another computer. I can just take the clone, which is all the files on my drive, attach it to the other computer, drag those files over and copy it at USB speed instead of network speed SneakerNet. So it's a great. It is not the same as a backup, but it is a backup and it's a safety net and the utilities have gotten. It's not like the old days where a clone only had whatever was today and if something changed today that was bad and then the clone ran.
The bad thing happened on your clone as well. Now with APFS inversioning, you get I think they call it safety net, which is as much as your space allows on the drive. So I highly recommend using a tool like one of these buying an SSD, attaching it to your Mac, backing up every day, every two days, using this as well as other approaches, because you can't have enough and I found it incredibly useful. So Carbon Copy Cloner 7 is just out in like a couple months ago and is very nice from Bobbage Software, so recommended.
2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure I have a license, but I'm just going to send them another 50 bucks because it's such a great program and, like you, I've been using second copy from Shirt Pocket Software. But one of the great things about a copy on write file system like APFS is this snapshot feature, and a good use of snapshots can save your keister. I use it on Linux as well not this program, but I use a Linux COW file system. It makes a big difference. It's really nice.
2:14:47 - Andy Ihnatko
And cloning is such a big relief because, let's say that suddenly your laptop, your MacBook, doesn't boot at all. Like, okay, worst case is like, well, this is the worst possible time because I've got something due in two hours and it's going to cost us $8,000 if I don't do this. Okay, well, just boot off of your clone and your backup and running without anything whatsoever. Yeah, so that's part of any nutritious backup breakfast having an actual bootable clone within inches of your machine. It's not the only backup you should have. Obviously, you need to have stuff offsite and on different media, but, yeah's, that's part of a good breakfast good, good bit good pick uh classic if I might say potatoes, like I said yeah, and by the way, that's I think you misspoke.
It's super duper by shirt pocket software yeah, super duper what did I say? Wonderful, that's the one that I use for for cloning.
2:15:38 - Leo Laporte
Like this second copy is my windows. They're both really good they've been around.
2:15:42 - Jason Snell
They go back and forth with updates, I think. I think, uh, carbon copy cloner cloner is newer now, but you know that means that shirt pocket is going to be coming out with a super duper like they just go back and forth. They're both great. They both do a little bit different things. They're both great.
2:15:55 - Leo Laporte
Use one my sense I might be wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong is that it's a front end to rsync. Is that true or no?
2:16:03 - Jason Snell
I think there's a lot going on. I think that that may be part of it but I think that there's a lot going on there, especially since they're using APFS snapshots, yeah, and then there are things you can do. Obviously there are those power user features where you can say don't you know, don't clone this, right? Uh, run this script when you're done. They like they've got all that kind of stuff built in there too mike bomb bitch from bomb, it's all for ages I love it.
2:16:26 - Leo Laporte
Thank you very much, jason snell. sixcolors.com/jason, if you're curious what uh he's up to, there's a whole page devoted to that. That's right. Anything in particular you want to highlight, your, your show about all the Olympic gold medalists, or something I would say?
2:16:42 - Jason Snell
the absurd uh D&D stylings of my very first D&D group and we are still playing. It's the the egglaths angels campaign at total party kill. It's the incomparable/com. Total party kill is our actual play D&D podcast and that group in particular. New episodes are rolling out right now. That group in particular a high amount of chaos, energy. It's fun.
2:17:04 - Leo Laporte
We uh make trouble and we have simplified your jason page. Now you've kind of collapsed it. So is this is is this on the incomparable mothership yeah, uh no, the cover a couple.
2:17:16 - Jason Snell
Mothership is the main podcast on the incomparable network because there's both things right total party kill is the name, and I'm it's. It's in there somewhere. No, it's not the incomparable.com.
2:17:25 - Leo Laporte
tpk, check it out okay, but you see this the Jason.
2:17:30 - Jason Snell
I'm showing the Jason page yeah, I have every podcast now you just have. I tried to slim it down because it was too much no, it wasn't.
2:17:37 - Leo Laporte
It was great, it was an inspiration. Yeah, okay, I'll put uh. I'll put uh total party kill back on there.
2:17:40 - Jason Snell
No, no, it wasn't. It was great, it was an inspiration. Yeah, okay, I'll put uh, I'll put uh total party kill back on there no, no, you don't have to.
yeah, just go to the incomparable.com, right yeah, yeah, you can do it and you can see why it's like he's collapsed the outline or just yeah, well, I mean, you know, if you want to listen to the podcast that we do about magnum pi, you can do that too. It's the least consequential podcast I do, but it's fun weekend at characters summon greater landscaper yeah, we were very silly. Yeah, we were in our dm's life so fun, so fun.
2:18:11 - Leo Laporte
If you ever have a hole at your table, all right, special guest, special guest, special guest. We'll do it. I'll be a necromancer, okay, I don't know. I don't even know what that means. Thank you, jason. We figured it out. Andy and I go GBH.
2:18:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Boston. Yep, it was just on Thursday. You can go to WGBHnews.org to listen to all that. I'm next on, I think, a week from Thursday at 1230. Again, wgbhnews.org.
2:18:40 - Leo Laporte
Nice, Wonderful having you Andrew. It's a treat, of course. Officehours.global is the home for the one and only Alex.
2:18:49 - Alex Lindsay
Lindsay Sure announced the new mic today and we'll be talking about it with sure tomorrow.
2:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Is it a motive? Is it?
2:18:56 - Alex Lindsay
one of the MV series. It is a new. It's like the SM4, I think they call it um. It's brand new. I think it went out today. Um, you know, the announcement went out today, the sm. Let's see here, if I can find it here sm, yeah, sm4, it's 200 podcast, mike and um. So we'll have, uh sure, on tomorrow. Talk a little bit about davis will be joining you.
2:19:16 - Leo Laporte
She's great, davidson. I'm sorry that'll be great, yes she's really good.
2:19:20 - Alex Lindsay
So if you're interested in mics, we're a little obsessive with mics. A lot of us have way more than we need, but this one. I'm always looking for a mic that's going to be, an expensive one that I can send out to people.
2:19:32 - Leo Laporte
I'm not a fan of the mic you use. I'll be honest with you.
2:19:34 - Alex Lindsay
There's no high end on it.
2:19:43 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting that you're not getting that. I'm I interested we I asked you a couple weeks ago. Are you doing processing?
2:19:46 - Alex Lindsay
and you said no, and I thought well, I don't do any processing you, let's try it sound like you're in a shoe. Well, let me, let me. Does it sound? Does it sound any better now?
2:19:51 - Leo Laporte
well, you got to say something okay, I'm talking right now.
2:19:54 - Alex Lindsay
Does it sound any better now?
2:19:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what's wrong. I don't know I don't know I what kind of microphone is that?
2:20:00 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, this is a Neumann TLM-102. Yeah, see, that's the thing.
2:20:02 - Leo Laporte
It's a $1,000 microphone folks, so it's got to be better than our cheap $350 Heil PR-40s and he's using a Shure SM7B the USB mic. I think that sounds good too.
Yeah, I don know, it sounds pretty good on our podcast, so I'm not sure exactly on. Maybe muddy's better. Maybe, if you're celine dion, they want money, right? Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I don't get it. Okay, anyway, thank you Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason, thanks to all of you, especially our club to it members, for watching and listening.
We stream now everywhere, everywhere. We start in the club to a discord, but we're also on youtube.com/twit/live, twitch.tv/twit, we're on Kick, Linkedin, x.com, Facebook, and I'm sure I left something out, but we're everywhere. Seven different streams. So no, I'm not. Somebody said are you serious? You're going back to the studio? Did I say I was going back to the studio? If I went back back there, it looks like a nuclear bomb hit it. I'm not going back to the studio, there's nothing left. I'm staying right here. Right here, my friends, every tuesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern, 1800 utc.
You can watch on those streams live. But I beg of you, please get a copy, subscribe in your favorite podcast player and download and listen that way, because that way we can't really count the live streams. So our audience numbers would be better if you would just subscribe and listen. Remember, you got to do both. You can also watch it on YouTube. You can even watch it on our website, twit.tv/mbw. But however you consume Mac Break Weekly, we're just very glad that you do. Unfortunately, now, I must say, as I have now for so many episodes, it's time to get back to work, because break time is over.
