MacBreak Weekly 936 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. Alex Lindsay's here, Andy Ihnatko here filling in for Jason Snell, the wonderful Mikah Sargent, and we finally have a date for the big iPhone announcement. What we can look forward to? Maybe even some surprises. One of Apple's most popular products, which hasn't been updated in a while, is suddenly very hard to buy at Apple stores. Hmm, wonder what that means? There's a brand new chief financial officer coming to Apple and Ted Lasso might be coming back. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.
0:00:2 - VO
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWiT.
0:00:41 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 936, recorded Tuesday, august 27th, 2024, Umbrage In This Economy? It's time for mac break weekly, the show where we get together and talk about the latest apple news, of which there is some large amount at this point. Alex Lindsay is here from officehours.global See how good his lighting looks. Big sources he's in a giant bubble. I'm in a bubble.
0:01:12 - Alex Lindsay
I'm in a big white bubble. I got to get the bubble, I got to get the bubble going.
0:01:15 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for being here from officehours.global. See, he does this for a living 090.media. That's why he looks so good. Also, so good, also with us, Andy Ihnatko.
0:01:26 - Andy Ihnatko
He's in the library. That's why he looks so good. Yes, because I'm surrounded by learning. So, by osmosis, you hang out with a smart crowd. You look smarter.
0:01:33 - Leo Laporte
That's my motto, surrounded by learning and, of course, that being you guys Also here. Jason Snell can't make it today, so we have the benefit, the wonderful benefit, of Mr Mikah Sargent visiting us from his radon-infested bedroom I mean basement.
0:01:49 - Mikah Sargent
I'm pleased to report that the radon has been mitigated. Yay, yay.
0:01:55 - Leo Laporte
How do they mitigate that?
0:01:56 - Mikah Sargent
Basically, you have to have a series of ducts and ventilation fans installed underneath the property and it essentially blows constantly up into the air way up above and then it goes away.
0:02:11 - Leo Laporte
Where it will only harm the populace instead of you.
0:02:14 - Mikah Sargent
No, by that point it's so dissipated that it doesn't cause the issues that it does when it gathers.
0:02:20 - Alex Lindsay
My understanding is that it really wasn't a problem until we figured out how to insulate our houses.
0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
It was going right through, really wasn't a problem until we figured out how to insulate our houses yeah, so yeah, that's right, it was going right through, it wasn't a problem.
0:02:27 - Alex Lindsay
It just builds up because we, uh, because we figured out how to close everything off absolutely so we have a date and it is not the date anybody predicted.
September 9th, which is a monday, uh, which you can do, I realize have gone out you can do it, because you're not, you don't have a full crew, there's no stage like there's not. You know, you don't have a hundred people doing a live show from the stage, so you can do it. And they can do it anytime, can't they? Because they could have done it at midnight it says we're glowing with excitement.
0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
It looks like the uh northern lights the aurora borealis, doesn't it? It also looks like the outline of siri uh in ios 18 ah, it's the new siri, yeah, so now I'm going to ask you Mikah, because you're young and hip glow up is a thing the young people say, yeah, it's uh like your goal. You're growing up, except not you're glowing up well it's.
0:03:23 - Mikah Sargent
It's more than grow. It involves growing up. It's the idea that, uh, we all go through those awkward stages and we look back at photos of ourselves and you're like, oh man, but then, as you get older and you find yourself, and you find your confidence and you find your style, then you start to look great and that's called a glow up, and so I do think that this is them saying siri is about to get a glow up. It used to be bad and now siri is getting a glow up and look at how cool it is now interesting, so funny, because I thought I don't know why I interpret this more as like a watch thing.
0:04:00 - Leo Laporte
So what? We? Here's what we know. We know that there will be a new iphone 16. Obviously this is the iphone event. There will be a new applehone 16. Obviously this is the iphone event. There will be a new apple watch. There's been a lot of rumors about it being thinner with a bigger screen. Uh, there we think there might be new airpods, airpods and airpods pro. Poor christina warren was saying will there be a new airpod max? No, probably not, but anyway, who knows, it's been how many years since the earpod Max came out with no updates whatsoever. So, uh, something. And then, uh, there's been a lot of stories about the m4 Max going into testing. People are seeing it on Geekbench and stuff, but that won't be probably next month yeah, that would almost certainly be an October event, that's so.
0:04:44 - Andy Ihnatko
iPads are also things that we're kind of thinking about. Particularly, we're thinking about the iPad Mini. There are a whole bunch of stories about how iPad Minis are running out of stock in places, so that would imply that Apple's getting ready to clear the benches to introduce a brand new one, which would come none too soon for me, because I think it's one of the greatest products that Apple makes, and I was looking into it a couple months ago, and it turns out that one of the biggest uses of iPad minis is private aviation. Ever since all the logs, all the papers, are now switched to iPads, iPad minis are specifically really, really good for smaller airplanes, and that's one of the reasons that it keeps in business.
0:05:26 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that iPads in general are really tied into aviation. I mean, there's just so many people using flight checks and so on and so forth. It's a nice touchscreen. You can design the interface and get, gather the information and build the interfaces. It's really really powerful.
0:05:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, not just that, the big flight case that a pilot used to have to take on every flight, with all of the documentation, all the binders. It is now standardized on the iPad. Now it's not even like there are a lot of options, it's like you are expected to have an iPad to carry all this stuff with. So that's, that's one of the reasons why iPad is not going away. Cheaper iPads are not going away either interesting um.
0:05:59 - Leo Laporte
We love the iPad mini. That's my bedside computer.
0:06:03 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like it's it's I either want, like, a really good folding iphone or I want an iPad mini. I think I'm going to get the iPad mini faster and it's going to be better and it's going to be cheaper.
0:06:13 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I think you're right yeah, uh, iphone 16 four models, three models. There'll be a slim we'd.
0:06:23 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, there's so many rumors about this, you'd think by now we know exactly I would love for apple to make a slim if that meant that the max you know the pro and the max went thicker. Just give me more battery, whatever you know like, just let me like go the other direction. I don't think that will, but I that would be my I'd love to have them have one. They define a slim like hey, if you really want slim, you can have it so that the rest of us can have, you know, two days of battery, one day with lots of cameras.
0:06:50 - Andy Ihnatko
The stories about the iPad slim have it like, particularly from Gurman, have it not as a new trade dress for the iPhone line, but we're a brand new, separate model for people who are going to prefer like design over like max features, like design over like max features. So it'll be like a new, exactly just like there's an iphone iphone 16 and iphone 16 plus pro, whatever, there's going to be a separate one called the iPad. Excuse me, called the iphone uh slim and then I called the iphone air I don't know, this year, you think, or next year probably, I'm guessing, next year.
the thing is like we're now. We're now close enough to the event that if there were some kind of a mock-up, it would have leaked by now, and it hasn't. We've seen leaks of what the main thing looks like and it's going to be much unchanged. I think the only physical feature that seems likely is the camera bump is a little bit smaller. There's also a lot of talk about what's going to be happening with the capture button, which now I'm really thinking that they're going to have a lot to talk about.
The capture button. When we were, when we were first talking about it, when it first came about, it's about oh great, we can have like a separate, a dedicated shutter button, a button that actually launches the camera and take a picture, or something that we can script or something that we can assign to launch any app. Now I'm thinking wouldn't that be like a natural if you're calling it the capture button, a way of telling apple intelligence, look at this and tell me what I'm looking at, and not have to launch an app, not have to even speak anything, but simply, uh, just like if you're in the international candy store, you don't understand what the wrappers means. Hold up the phone, press the capture button and it will say oh, that's a russian candy. It it's kind of like a resin, more like it looks like a caramel. I don't think you want it, unless you have really great teeth.
Ok, well, the only other cool thing is that now Apple doesn't have to explain no, no, no, 66 gigabytes of RAM is not too little amount, because we use our RAM much better than a system application application RAM, much better than others.
The other rumor is that the minimum RAM is going to be eight across the board. Again, a lot of this stuff is going to be supporting Apple intelligence, and so this is going to reflect the needs for the next three or four years a lot more than any previous phone has ever done before, because Apple had so many different ways of kind of stretching out the service life of any phone that you bought. But Apple intelligence is really going to be the difference between either you can either you've got enough RAM to run this or you do not, and we're not going to mess around and giving you a limited experience because you have limited RAM. You are just not going to be able to run Apple intelligence, so I think they're going to have to be erring on the side of more, more capabilities in the future, just to make sure that whatever they're coming up with five years from now is not going to immediately obsolete phones that they sold like three or four years earlier um, yeah, so apple intelligence will not come out?
0:09:44 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I can't believe. September 9th is a week from monday, yeah, weeks from yesterday. Uh will not come out, uh, right away in october. But you're saying so. You're saying they'll, they'll ship phones that will have both the capability of run, running apple intelligence, the new eight gigs of ram and the 18 chip.
0:10:03 - Andy Ihnatko
But there might be some that don't no, no, I'm saying that from now on like they can't.
They can't cheap out on resources they have to make sure that because they've been saying all along, and everything has been backing this up, that the really good Apple intelligence features are not going to be seen until the middle of next year. And wouldn't that frost your cornflakes if? Oh, by the way, uh, the plane, you should have gotten the pro, because uh, actually the only the pro max has enough ram to do the stuff that we've been putting in all those cool ads. So, yeah, that's what. That's why, like, just table stakes is going to have to be minimum. It runs apple intelligence, so they're not going to be able to cheap out with less application ram than usual good.
0:10:45 - Leo Laporte
So the uh. According to nine five, mac chance miller writing and he seems to have collated all the rumors the iphone 16s, a18, that's gonna be obvious, paired with a new eight gigs of ram, up from six, that's for apple intelligence. There's the uh, the uh. Well, we have an action button now, so will there be four, five?
0:11:05 - Mikah Sargent
that's what's wild to me, this, this rumor of an extra, extra button. It made me wonder how often, leo, do you actually find yourself? Well, I guess, alex too because you, I know, or have you have the latest iphone are y'all using your action button often.
0:11:22 - Alex Lindsay
I liked, I tell myself I do, and then I I check into myself and I don't I use it a couple times a day, um and the, and the reason for it is it's connected to a. It's kind of a shortcut that turns my lights off so, so I turn.
0:11:35 - Leo Laporte
It's about the most trivial possible use for it.
0:11:37 - Alex Lindsay
It is it's a trivial possible use, but I use it all the time as I, as I leave the my office, I just tap it and all my lights turn off and everything goes back to where it was. Um, and so I I can't say that I'm using it in an incredibly a powerful way, um, but it is, I use it. I use it. I'm glad it's a button that I can define for that um and talk to chat gpt but do you, which I don't do all that often anymore.
0:11:58 - Leo Laporte
But if we get a smart siri I think that's what they're preparing for this button should be the button to your personal pal, because what you could do, alex, is say, hey, turn off the lights, exactly right, yep, so it would be a multi-purpose, yeah, and I would, but I'd love to have a button that was just.
That was just chat, I mean chat gpt or ai or whatever would be great, because I I use chat gpt all day, yeah, so joe, our discord joe, who is a photographer street photographer, by the way uh will be leading our uh, our uh photo walk on september 7th from bryant park through the uh, through the manhattan um. He says he uses the action button for his camera, so that's why I kind of wonder if you need a camera button, or maybe this is just another. A second how many buttons? Five buttons would be then.
0:12:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's, it's. It's an interesting contraposition to stuff that we've been hearing before about how Apple wants stylistically one button mouse.
Yeah, and and and that they don't. They don't even want to have a USB-C port on there anymore. They don't want to have physical buttons anymore. They just want like haptic sensors, kind of like the touchpad on MacBooks. And so now every story that we're getting is that they are open to having extra buttons on there, and again the message on almost every flagship phone moving forward is going to have to be it's an AI phone, as to the extent short of the extent where it becomes super, super hype.
But if there's a really good feature, again, look at this thing and tell me what it is. Help me at this thing I'm looking at right now. That kind of thing shouldn't be buried under several layers of app launches and interface, if that's something that they can say. By the way, here's a dedicated key for that and we can remap it, but it's default sets to our smart personal assistant that's multimodal and can deal with stills and video and audio. That's a hell of a place to put it. The funny thing is that one of the biggest failure phones in the history of phones was, of course, amazon's Fire Phone, and that was one of its breakthrough features. It had a button on the side that just basically said help me out with this and see, show me what this is, uh. And so it would be nice just to be able to, uh, to salvage a good idea from an otherwise like absolute edsel fire festival of a phone so, as uh vasco points out in our YouTube chat, siri, of course, can be activated by long pressing the screen off that's true.
0:14:29 - Mikah Sargent
You can also say out loud the certain two commands yeah but I, but I notice.
0:14:34 - Leo Laporte
So this is my question for you. I noticed on the new pics. I just got the new Pixel 9. They, you have a choice between Gemini, gemini, gemini it is gemini.
0:14:45 - Andy Ihnatko
By the way, is that a gemini gemini?
0:14:47 - Leo Laporte
it should be gemini you don't say it's a, it's a, I got a. I got a minai burrito. You don't say I got an ini file, you say any. So why is it gemini? Anyway, I'm sorry, old man yelling at class. Uh, you do have a choice. I guess is the point that there is this standard google voice and then there's uh, the advanced, uh, google intelligence. Do you think apple will go that route, or will they just make series smarter and just say leave it at that?
0:15:16 - Mikah Sargent
well, there was that problem, that that, uh, there would be an. Oh sorry, alex, I was just gonna say there was. There's a rumor that, um, siri could be replaced by a smarter version and that it is something entirely new. That is not Siri. I think it depends on how much, arguably, I think it depends on how much the marketing team feels like Siri has baggage, whether that is a change. I mean, what would it be baggage? Whether that is a change. I mean, what would it be? You'd say Apple instead, because everybody else is kind of going away from just brand name to a specific name. So in that way Siri makes more sense but go ahead, alex.
0:15:55 - Alex Lindsay
I think the hard part of that I have is I have so many devices that if I say hey, shlomo, so many devices turn on that I can't tell what I'm telling to do. What you, my guy, you know, and so I just I had rap music playing up here yesterday.
0:16:09 - Leo Laporte
I couldn't figure out where the hell it was coming from and I have a little mini HomePod mini up on a shelf that must have gotten. The top got tapped accidentally and I was like I searched the whole place. Where's that sound? Where's that coming from? Who's playing rap music? It, and it was me.
0:16:24 - Alex Lindsay
It was like I told, I told this my my speaker to you know my Apple, you know the, the, the HomePod big one. I said you know, stop playing. Hey, you know stop playing, or whatever. And it said I have not, I'm not playing anything, I'm like you are playing something and it was coming from my phone because my Siri on my phone had taken over and was serving up, uh, all the songs.
0:16:43 - Leo Laporte
So and incidentally, the reason I couldn't figure out was the home pod mini is. I thought that sounds too good to be a home pod mini, that's right it was it sounded. I was surprised how good it sounded.
0:16:57 - Alex Lindsay
The mini made that the problem with the mini, for me, was the same problem, which is that, a sometimes things wouldn't connect to it and, b it kept on doing things when I didn't want it to, and so I finally took them out of my house. Well, I have this.
0:17:10 - Leo Laporte
I have this good idea ridiculous ambition that I will have minis. See, I'm really trying to get all into home kit. You know I'm doing the home bridge and all that and I'm I would.
0:17:18 - Mikah Sargent
I have this notion that maybe I will have a little mini in every room and you can talk like you're talking to your house and and as it gets smarter, I'll be able to just talk wherever I am and you must be like the ocean, in the sense that you sort of roll this in and roll it out, because you may recall that you gave me at one point a couple of HomePod minis, so that must have been a time where you thought I'm not going to do this, I have so many to roll back in. You said I'll try it again so many.
0:17:47 - Alex Lindsay
I find a home home kit is kind of like lucy.
0:17:49 - Leo Laporte
You know, there's always that football it's and you're always going to run and try to kick it, but every time it's going to pull that.
0:17:55 - Alex Lindsay
They're going to pull that out. I mean it. Just I just don't think that apple will never succeed at home kit until they start building their own devices, like until they just go. We're going to build five or you know five or six different devices that all sit inside and core and build the core and then let everyone else do the. The problem is those six devices would probably be 90 of the market and so that'd be hard to figure out. Who's going to do. But I just think apple should.
I just don't think they'll ever, they will never succeed integrating with other people. Like it's just not what they do, they're not good at it and they they're never going get, they just have to build their own. They don't play nice with others, they just don't understand other people, like you know, and then everyone else, because everyone else is kind of like well, we wanted to work with this and this and this and this, you know, rather than people just building for HomeKit. But the HomeKit is not big enough because it's not working to just be building for that no-transcript, and it would probably be about three to five billion dollars for Apple to just go out. It would be a hobby.
0:18:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but that is an interesting question though, Like what to do with Shlomo, Like now that there'll be, because the leap the leap in how you interact with it, let alone what you can do with it, it's not subtle Like when I started using Gemini on my Android phone after being a very heavy user of the Google Assistant. It's like the ability to not have to patiently this is going to sound horrible and from a good point of view but not have to patiently wait when you know the assistant is on a wrong track, or, if you yourself changed your mind about something, be able to interrupt and go with something else. And being able to pick up on part of the conversation just 45 seconds ago and not have to restate the elements of what you're trying to achieve and what you want the thing to do. Once you start having that kind of a natural conversation tone with the assistant, it really does change the relationship, and so I wonder if they want to keep Shlomo, as this is something that is very lo-fi. It's going to have very. It's going to run on absolutely everything. You don't have to wonder whether or not certain AI features are going to be compatible with your old phone or not. It will absolutely work. Whatever vocabulary that you've been using for the past four or five years to do simple things like set timers and reminders and turn lights on or off, that will absolutely work exactly the same way.
We have this new thing called Apple Intelligence. It has an entirely different voice or choices of voices. Apple intelligence it has an entirely different voice or choices of voices, and you are expect and as a conversationalist, as a human being, you would expect that, oh, I hear this voice talking to me. I know that I can have a more complicated, in depth conversation. The difference between talking to a clerk at a fast food restaurant versus talking to the sommelier at a decent restaurants, like it's like. I know that I can have an in-depth. I'm interested in kind of dry wines. I don't know a whole lot, but I really like stuff from this vineyard or some stuff from this label and I can spend 30 or $40. Let's have a conversation about what kind of wine would make me happy versus a Big Mac extra value meal. After my meal, Dr Pepper to drink, and I'd also like a Filet-O-Fish sandwich to wrap to take home.
0:21:09 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, for me, talking has been really. I mean, when I use ChatGPT, when I'm walking, I just find it to be magical, like I said, tell me about this and tell me about this, and tell me about this, and I go, what about this? But like, for instance, I Like, for instance, I wanted to build my diet for my lunches. My son and I are eating the same lunches right now and we wanted to build them. So what we did is we went to ChatGPT and I said I want lunches with these ingredients, I want to be able to make them all in three hours on Sunday and I want them to be able to be stored so that I have them all for the whole week.
And so, first, just tell me what you would give me. And we looked at it and we said, okay, that looks pretty good, said okay, give me the recipes. And so it gave me all the recipes, um, and I said make it for two people, because the two of us are making it. By the way, the numbers were a little off. I think I made enough, uh, quinoa salad to last for a week.
So, anyway, so, um, uh, but uh that's easy to do by the way so much turns out three cups of quinoa goes a long way turns into a lot of quinoa.
So, anyway, um and so, but then I said um, give me, uh, give me the rest, give me all the the shopping list, give me a shopping list and condense, give me a shopping list for all the things that are there. And it just gave me that. And I said, and I had, I organized it. I told it said make it alphabetical, based on the ingredient. And it did all of that. Um, make that a, that a. You know text, you know text file that I can put into notes? And it gave me that and that kind of thing. And I'm eating it all week and it's really good and and I.
But I think that those kinds of things are so powerful and they're to your point, andy, they're more powerful when you can just say them, like when you sit there and just you're talking and everything else, and when you're doing that, if I do that while I'm talking, it will. Um, if I'm not looking at it, it'll just put all that stuff in. And when I come back to chat gpt, it's all there, like, here's all the files that you were asking for and you're ready to go. And I think that when apple starts to integrate them and like make that, put that into notes, or I could be in notes and asking for those things and just puts them in. Make that amount, make that amount, make that a shopping list, make that a this, make it that it's, it's a. It really is pretty transformational because you're really getting customized content. You're getting exactly what you want out of that and I'm finding that, like, when I ask it to explain something to me, I still check it. You know, trust but verify. But many times if I ask the question, well, I get the right answer and sometimes I have to to check, like it does three cups of quinoa does sound like something I would say yeah, it was a good amount
that's good, yeah, but it was like I asked that because I remember there was a scene in 1991, uh, at at a certain um club with nirvana that I might have been at, and um, they and they, and I said when did nirvana play at um in pittsburgh, you know, I was just trying to remember the date, which turns out to be really close to now. And it told me and I said where do they play? And they said the wrong thing. And I said, and it was funny as you go, are you sure it's there? And it goes oh, no, no, it's actually here. And I'm always amazed. All I have to ask for is are you sure? And it will immediately give me the right answer. I'm like, why didn't you just give me the right answer the first?
0:24:06 - Andy Ihnatko
time.
It's like we're developing our own social etiquette with it.
It's okay to say I'm trying to figure out when Weird Al Yankovic might have played Southern New England in the mid-80s, but you add the phrase and I want your information to be correct that actually will have a change depending on the model, like it's.
I mean. This is what fascinates me about this relationship that humanities is having with this technology. Just like you have this conversation about how I was watching video this morning about why there are so many different versions of thank you in Japanese and the person was explaining about, whereas we say thank you or thank you very much or thanks, that's great and we just add words and make it more intense or more casual. There is so much context of you have put yourself out. There is no way that I can possibly repay this and I want you to know that, the way that you've been on and on and on, that we're going to have our own culture with, with computers, with AIs, this way, that it's not it's. It might seem weird in a culture to say and I want you to give me the correct answer, or I want you to bias your answer towards most factual correctness, but that's just simply the cultural language that this culture speaks.
0:25:26 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, we used to always say that you know, it's not what you know, it's how well you Google and, and you know it is a lot of times it is like asking Google in a specific way I, I, I, definitely, when I go to search Google, I search very specifically, very pithy. I know exactly what order I want to put them in and and I will get the, I'll get the answers that I need really quickly. In the same sense, um, I'm very specific about how I ask uh, chat, gpt or other ones to do, do things. You know, like, I tell it what it is. You are this, I want this, um, I, you are this and I am this. Oftentimes, like, you are this and I, you are, uh, a physicist.
You know Nishikikaku, I am a 10th grader. Like now, explain this and put it in this format. And when I do that, and if I tell it little things like what andy just said, like you know, uh, explain it clearly and and succinctly, but be as accurate as you can. That's what I've said. It it does make a remarkable difference and it's just a really again, the speed of learning for me is just accelerated exponentially.
0:26:28 - Mikah Sargent
I don't see so. When Google shows off what the Pixel device can do, when Apple has shown off what Apple intelligence can do, they are not showing these sort of tips and tricks that you are both talking about.
0:26:48 - Alex Lindsay
And I don't see the average user doing that?
0:26:49 - Mikah Sargent
right, I don't see the average user doing that.
0:26:51 - Alex Lindsay
I know it's prompt engineering, and if you follow prompt engineers, they'll tell you all these things Like here's how to do this and here's how to do that and here's how to get this kind of thing, and this means something to the algorithm when you say this, you know, or the to the, to the whatever, and so so the, you know the average person, and you can get anything to hallucinate if you push it hard enough, like you know, you can. You can, you know, punch it into a corner and get it to do things it wasn't designed to do by by, you know, asking it crazy questions or you know that kind of thing, and so so it's. It is uh, um. So I think that there's, there's ways to, you know, push it, but I think the average person, what the challenge is always that companies who are doing this are all. They want everyone to use it, so they want to make it seem easy. Yeah, and the problem is they don't give you.
We used to joke because google was always trying to make hangouts seem easy, you know, and they'd be like you know because and we used to, we were when they hired us to do stuff we would have a million, or not a million but maybe a half million dollars of hardware on both ends, you know, to make sure that it looks amazing and and did everything. And we take pictures, I would say, because hangouts are easy and the bottom line is it's still like you, still like. You need an ethernet cable or it's not going to. The hangouts are not going to sound as good You're. You need a real mic, you need a. You know all these things and they wanted to make it feel like you could just open up a laptop and it would be fine no-transcript, like what's good and what's not.
I'm actually surprised at how often chat GPT tells me that like I can't answer that I don't have the information for that.
0:29:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and how upset we get when you say, oh God, what you mean you can't go into my calendars. Well, no, I could pretend that I can go into your calendars, but I'd make you happy. I don't think you'd be happy if I were making things up. But yeah, it really is like this to me at this moment at least, for the way that I use these services, there's still a hard line between I'm searching for facts and I just want to create something, even if what I'm creating is just an idea. If I want to work through ideas, for what are my, if I want to, I'm using this web service and it uses this language I've never heard of, called Blah. And do you know anything about asking Gemini? Do you know anything about this programming language, this web language? So how easy do you think it would be for someone who just knows JavaScript and JavaScript pretty much? I know most web technologies, but I'm not a professional. How hard would it be to do an interactive section of a website, given this language? And they work well. Here's some frameworks you could do. Well, I'm not interested in. I don't know if I want to learn frameworks. I want to do something kind of simple. Okay, well then, javascript kind of works like this, but not really that's the sort of stuff that I use these clients for, and so the idea of stuff that I use these, uh, these, these clients for, and so the the the idea of having guard rails, of expectations, of saying this is this, this is the tool inside this phone that will absolutely turn your lights on and off. This will absolutely. You will ask the question I want it to be cooler in this room. It will definitely turn on the ac and turn it off when it reaches a certain temperature versus. I'm trying to figure out how to save money on the heating and cooling in my living room. What are the different strategies that I could go for this? And without having to outline, here are my goals, here are my resources, here's my budget, here's the people who are living in this thing.
Having a conversation with somebody and not knowing where it's going that's one of the big carrots that Google first dangled in front of us three or four years ago, when they first started talking heavily about what they hope to do with artificial intelligence by moving the whole focus of the company towards AI the idea of having conversations with an AI and exploring ideas, as opposed to the thing doing your homework for you. And as more time passes, I think we need to wean people off these flying car ideas and onto this idea of sometimes you don't know what question to ask. If you knew the question to ask how do I find a crew neck sweater that's made out of rayon and orlon, that's sourced this way, that is available in this store If you knew all those questions, you could just Google it. You'd find it.
As opposed to I'm looking for a sweater that is durable, that is going to pack well and travel well and not cost me a whole lot of money. Well, and travel well and not cost me a whole lot of money. And to have a conversation about what's available, what happens, even if it's a larger goal than simply getting a sweater. That's the sort of thing that we're gonna have to train people to expect from AI, as opposed to turn on the lights.
0:32:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and one last thing that I wanted to say is I also think that there's probably a lot of this quote unquote prompt engineering that goes on behind the scenes and, funny enough, as we were talking about, this Anthropic just started publishing. I don't know who has access to be able to show something on screen, but if you go to line 81 in the spreadsheet, has started publishing in its release notes. The system prompts that are by default provided to uh Claude, and so here it shows the we've seen these, uh Apple in the Apple code too, Exactly.
And I think that that plays a role in making it so that the individual is not required to do as much of this, uh, this prompt engineering on their own, so that you can just say I want a new sweater and I live in this place, or even it already knows where you live and suggest a sweater based on that. I, just as much as we're all good at nerding out and figuring out the precise, exact, perfect way to brew that cup of coffee and in this case, brewing that cup of coffee is telling the assistant what you want the average person, if they do it at all, is going to hit the button and hope for the best. And I think that the sort of preemptive, prompt engineering, if you will, um, is going to be important, and I wonder how big a role that's going to play in each of the ais, kind of standing out for a company this also tells you a lot about the culture of each ai company.
0:33:54 - Leo Laporte
Because anthropic is, uh, safety focused. They left google, uh, because they didn't like what google was doing safety-wise. And so you see things in this prompt like claude always responds as if it is completely face blank by the way, it's not, but it responds as if it is. If the shared image happens to contain a human face, claude never identifies or names any humans in the image. There's a lot of safety in here.
0:34:17 - Andy Ihnatko
You get a lot of complaints from your users that way. On a lot of the Reddit subreddits about claude and uh and ai, people are complaining that oh well, they made claude a lot dumber in the past couple of weeks. That's usually because they put in a new guardrail or they change some they change some of these prompts that are built in to essentially no, you can't do it the way that you've always been doing it. Try to find a new way to do it, yeah I some.
0:34:39 - Leo Laporte
I go back and forth constantly, not only just with HomePod minis, but in general. I go back and forth on AI and on safety. I often think, you know, just let AI be AI, forget safety, throw it out the window, let's see what it can do. And the safety comes from users. As we've just been talking about understanding what the limitations of the AI are, as we've just been talking about understanding what the limitations of the ai are, uh and and and the user using human intelligence to vet the information it gets. I think that I think that that's preferable to an ai being kind of artificially dumbed down, especially because it doesn't work very well, it's not it's a problem.
0:35:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons in the sense that, yeah, if we dumbed down the ones that we're using, not everyone's going to do that, so dumbing down is just choosing not to be part of the process. I don't know how you win on this, yeah, yeah.
0:35:33 - Leo Laporte
Sounds like you're with me. Hey, we got to take a little bit break, but the main point of this conversation was a week from Monday, apple will announce new iPhones, likely a new Apple Watch, likely new AirPods, and, based on the fact that, as Andy noted, you can't get the Apple Mini, iPad Mini right now they're running out of stock maybe even new iPad Minis. We can but hope, right, andy? Yeah, we could just cross our fingers and hope.
0:36:01 - Andy Ihnatko
The heart wants what it wants. One very last thing it's I'm also curious to see when the Apple Watch comes out. Are they going to keep the pulse for the, the, the, the O2 sensor?
0:36:13 - Alex Lindsay
as it is, and just simply leave it disabled?
0:36:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Or are they simply removing it to comply with the Massimo ruling that came earlier this year? Isn't that interesting? Interesting thing to watch.
0:36:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you will be watching. I will not because I will be on a boat, but you will be. Or actually, that's right when I'm getting on a boat, which means I won't even be able to watch the stream. But, Mikah, you're going to do it for us, right?
0:36:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, rosemary Orchard has agreed to join me for that event, oh, perfect event.
0:36:44 - Leo Laporte
So rosemary orchard and I will be covering it live. I'm very excited. The iPad ios today team. It makes perfect sense. 10 am pacific time, september 9th. You can watch the stream here. Of course, you can watch it on apple's site. Um, what we usually do with these events? Because apple takes umbrage and, uh, I honestly can't afford Umbradge. So if Apple, if Apple take this economy.
0:37:04 - Alex Lindsay
Umbrage is expensive. You know way out of my inflation. You think inflation's bad for gas Umbrage and this unprecedented macroeconomic headwind?
0:37:12 - Leo Laporte
no, yeah, exactly so we don't stream it on YouTube is as a result, uh, but we do stream it everywhere else, as we do everything now. I hope you're enjoying this. I love it. We are now streaming in seven different venues. Uh, of course, our Club TWiT members get to watch us in in the discord which, I'll be honest, discord is not designed around streaming video, and so it's. You know, it's kind of iffy, uh, but you get this kind of, you know, inside the club uh view that discord is also where they're chatting. But we also stream on YouTube, except for apple events, but for mac break, weekly.
Yeah, youtube.com I probably shouldn't say that out loud, so kind of like suddenly I'm thinking maybe the umbrage will be uh spread anyway. youtube.com/twit/live. twitch.tv, hello Twitch. We get a lot of chatters in our Twitch, twitch.tv/twit. We're also on, uh, facebook linkedin, xcom kick right now, although we're thinking about I'd love your feedback swapping kick for telegram. Um, both of them, uh, you know, offer streaming and we just we can only I think we can only do seven with restream, our our partner here. So I think we're going to trade that for Kik, because we don't get a lot of response from Kik.
Kik for Telegram, where I think we would get more response. Anyway, you can watch that event a week from Monday 10 am Pacific and, of course, all our shows on those streams.
This episode of MacBreak Weekly, brought to you by ZocDoc there he is, there's the doc there. There's some things in life that it's okay if, uh, if it doesn't quite work out, if it hallucinates, uh, or if it does, you know, trying a new type of milk in your coffee. You know there's some. There's some things you shouldn't make milk out of used tires, for instance, or a cheap Instagram ad impulse buy. Or my favorite gas station, sushi, won't be doing that today, but you don't want to take a chance with the right doctor. It shouldn't be a crapshoot and that's why you need ZocDoc. With ZocDoc, it's because you've got more options than you know. You don't have to settle. You could find a doctor who takes your insurance, a doctor in your area, a doctor with a specialty that fits your needs. It's not just mds, it's chiropractors, it's dentists, it's within even md. You know, I was looking for a gerontologist. I found two in the area. That's awesome. Zocdoc Z-O-C-D-O-C it's a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network doctors, choose the right one for your needs and click to instantly book an appointment. That's the other thing. Often these doctors are available today, which is nice. We're talking about in-network appointments. More than 100,000 healthcare providers across every specialty mental health, dental health, eye care, skin care and a whole lot more. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located nearby, who are a good fit for the medical need you have and and this is something else very special who are highly rated by verified patients, because ZocDoc has reviews of all the docs and that's fantastic. You can really get a sense of what kind, what style, what the bedside manner is of a particular doctor. Sometimes people really like somebody who's going to give them every detail. Sometimes people just want somebody who's going to tell them what to do and that's it. So ZocDoc lets you narrow it down that way too. Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking, sometimes even same day appointments. Look at that, look at this. This is so great Right now. Stop putting off those doctor appointments, stop rubbing dirt on it. Go to zocdoc.com/macbreak to instantly book a top rated doctor today. Z-o-c-d-o-c zocdoc.com/macbreak. Thank you, ZocDoc, for supporting the show. zocdoc.com/macbreak
I ran during the break. I ran to get my Pixel 9, which came in a couple of days ago, and I realized, oh, I forgot to charge it last night. I left it in my man bag over. I haven't charged it since yesterday morning. It's still at 85%. This is people are going crazy over this. The battery life on the new Pixel 9 XL is incredible and it feels like it too. This is a heavy phone. Is it a mistake for Apple to focus on slim instead of massive battery life?
0:41:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple, historically, is very, very happy to simply keep battery life the same and give you extra power at the same size Also slimness, I love this.
0:42:01 - Leo Laporte
Google's actually increased this. Are you going to get a Pixel 9, andy? I know you're an Android guy. I don't know, maybe this year slimness, I love this Google's actually increased this. Are you going to get a Pixel 9, andy? I know you're an Android guy.
0:42:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, Maybe this year, maybe next. My Pixel 6 is three years old. We're now entering the window in which I can justify updating it. I might wait another year just to see what Apple does and to see what Google does, having learned from their first. Like all in AI phone, I'm telling you every time that I see public and private demos of what's going to be possible in three or four months if you have the right AI, like enabled phone, like oh, I would like to do that on my phone. I guess I don't get to do that.
Oh, wow, I could really see how that would help me out if I had a phone that was newer than this one, and I think a lot of people are going to be going through the exact same thing. There's going to be a real. It's a great time to have a three-year-old phone that has kind of a scratch screen and whose battery might need to be replaced in the next six months or so, Because I mean, you don't want to get. Oh look, the camera is a little bit better. Oh, look, the battery life is a little bit better. Oh, look, the screen is the adaptive screen. The frame rate is a little bit better when I'm playing games, but I don't play a lot of games.
What you're hoping for is the transformative effect, where I can do things with this device. I have solutions available to me that were not available to me before. There are opportunities available to me that were not available to me before. There are opportunities available to me that were not available to me before. A lot of people are going to be very, very happy with their next phone upgrade, that's for sure.
0:43:32 - Leo Laporte
I was very pleased. I thought that Call Notes I had read somewhere that Call Notes, which is the feature that I really wanted was not available in the US. And it is. I found it. Somebody texted me and said no, leo, you can get it in the US. I know I can't figure out where it is, but it is. That's the thing, where it records the call as you're doing it. It does tell everybody on the call this is being recorded and then the AI analyzes it and gives you notes on it.
0:44:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, not just a transcript, but just. Oh, here's. You have a new meeting set for 9 am next week. Terry said that he's going to have this available by Tuesday.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing where you quickly forget that you spent $1,000 on a brand new phone to replace a phone that was again a little bit of scratch on the screen, but otherwise working just fine.
Isn't it interesting, though, that Apple's going to have nearly as many working AI features in the phones that they release next month, but they are almost certainly going to be releasing the new version of the OS at the same time, whereas Google did something extremely weird. Remember that they did move up their launch date for the Pixel 9 by a couple of months. Usually, they follow the Apple event by about a month in October, and so these phones shipped with, like, not the new version of Android. The new version of Android Android 15, is not ready yet. It's not going to ship, probably until October, so everybody's going to be waiting on like a big update coming in October, which makes you wonder exactly how coordinated this decision to do the launch in August was and what they thought was on the line to make it that important to ship a phone with an almost without the most modern iteration of their top of the line operating system.
0:45:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they actually announced it earlier than they traditionally do, and I really think it was to get ahead of Apple, right.
0:45:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Probably. I think so. The thing is, I don't know enough about what goes on inside if it's that big of a deal. However, yeah, you can't avoid thinking that Apple whatever Apple shows off in September is definitely going to be placed within the context of competing phones a little bit from Samsung, but mostly from Google that are not just promising features but actually are delivering them. Not just delivering features either, but delivering the second or third iteration of a feature that they've had for a couple of years now. So maybe they'll get some. I don't think that they'll. They think that they're going to spank Apple by comparison, but they might sway some Android users from switching to iPhone. That way, they might lock in somebody who, again, who might have bought a new iPhone this year or next year, into thinking no, this Pixel 9 is really, really great.
I've seen what can be done with the Pixel 9. I've read the reviews now. I've seen all the sample demos. I've even seen all the negative reviews of it. And the iPhone, the new iPhone, just doesn't seem to stack up in terms of these really wonderful features, like this call call transcript feature, or like the put the new video and photo editing features that border from really really useful and handy to could be evil. I'm not evil, so I'm not worried about how I'm going to use it, but okay, Sure it could be used for purposes of evil. So, yeah, there's good there's going to be that consideration too.
0:46:53 - Mikah Sargent
I think the admin feature is just so cool.
0:46:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, have you played with?
0:46:58 - Mikah Sargent
it? I have not, but I've had. I had Lisa Edichico of CNET on the show on Tech News Weekly last week with her review and she talked about the Admi feature, and then the week before Jason Howell was at the event and got to try it out as well.
0:47:13 - Leo Laporte
And that seemed to stick out for people. Yeah, I just don't have any friends to try it with.
0:47:18 - Mikah Sargent
It's just such a great concept because not too long before we moved, I get together with some family members and I was the one with the best phone, so I'm setting up the photo and then had somebody else take a second photo with me in it and then it combined it, because in that moment it is not about trying to capture the exact event as it happened, it is capturing the memory of us all being together, and so I'm okay with it not being quote, unquote real, because it's just a touchstone, right, it's just a memory of that event.
0:48:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. When you get back to the idea that photos themselves none of them are truth, they're all 1, 1, 25th of a second. You can have the most beautiful picture of a happy family at the beach and the photo doesn't tell the story, that everyone was having a horrible time. They had to take eight pictures in which everybody was not crying, but you got one good photo of it. But so many people. It's great to see. This is how AI is going to win by delivering features that again solve problems or create opportunities.
Everybody has had the problem of damn. We took like six photos of the kids and in every one of them, one of them is looking the wrong way or has got a finger up their nose or is doing something to ruin the shot, and it's a different one every time. And when Google shows, when Google shows you the new, their new phone, and say, well, if you did take five pictures like that, but there's at least one of each, one has a good face in it. We'll composite that and put all. You can select which face you want of the best of the five and create a composite in the phone and that will be the one that you send on instagram to all you and to uh, to messages to everybody in five minutes, not two days later I'm playing with it a little bit here.
0:49:16 - Leo Laporte
I want to, let's see, I can edit, and then I can go to the new assistant features and I can circle. Let's say I want to take that pole pole out of here or tap to select there. Okay, and now erase that pole and let's see if it can get. This is a picture of the kitty cat, but there's a pole coming out of her head. I don't want that. Yeah, oh, look at that. That's pretty good. Nice job, google. All right, now I can take it and, uh, let me, uh, let me select the cat. Okay, and now I can reimagine it, which sounds scary. So what should I say with the cat? Reimagine? Uh, let's see, as I don't know, as a tiger. Yes, let's just see what happens to the kitty cat. Okay, generating a tiger cat. I'm sorry, it's so small if the edits don't blend.
Try erasing kitty cat, turn it into oh, look at that.
0:50:27 - Mikah Sargent
Can you bring it up towards I've?
0:50:32 - Leo Laporte
turned my cat into a tiger a very small one. Well, I can make her bigger too.
0:50:37 - Mikah Sargent
You can, you can I got a little tiger cat.
0:50:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, uh well, how are you're not so afraid of the big tigers when they can't come in through the kitty door?
0:50:47 - Mikah Sargent
that's true.
0:50:49 - Andy Ihnatko
The small ones can get in and infiltrate, they're more dangerous.
0:50:53 - Leo Laporte
I haven't played with this yet. What's interesting is, I selected a cat in one photo and then it modified all the other photos of the kitty cat oh, I thought those were just just.
0:51:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that's pretty good don't you?
0:51:07 - Leo Laporte
yeah, this is the cool thing that they do.
0:51:10 - Mikah Sargent
They've done a really great job of figuring out how the lighting and even the focus is in a photograph and using all of that to inform how it generates.
There was this um I think I can't remember who, I think it was, maybe the Verge but there was one review of this feature and they had this little girl sitting on a sofa and she was looking off to her right or her left doesn't really matter, looking off to the side at the sofa, and they had generated a dog, and not only was the lighting appropriate, but it also generated the proper sort of dips in the sofa with the dog laying on it where before it was completely flat, it had these sort of divots in the sofa. So it's very clever at what it was able to do. Another one where the photograph was of a chain link fence that was in focus and they said put, uh, I think, a lion, um in the shot, and the lion was in the background and because it was generated in the background, it was properly out of focus so that it looked like it belonged in the photograph, and that is something that is hard to achieve using photoshop, uh, or similar editing tools very, I mean tiger in a jungle.
0:52:25 - Leo Laporte
Let's see what, uh, what happens. Now they're gonna. Let's try to put this tiger in a jungle environment oh yeah, that's right, the whole photo, yeah yeah, no, that didn't do. Tap and hold to see changes. Uh, I guess it's so busy making a tiger that it forgot the jungle. Yeah, anyway, but you know, that's what you'd expect. This is cool, though. I mean, look at that. It made.
0:52:47 - Andy Ihnatko
It made my kitty cat into a tiger yeah, I like that and yeah, and it does seem to have some controls over making something terrible that could be dangerous, but not enough. Uh, the verge did have like an article that was backed up also by a really nice thread on threads about okay, here's just a girl who's kneeling on a carpet, let's put drug paraphernalia on the carpet next to her.
0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
There you go.
0:53:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Here's a scene in a subway. Let's add a smoking backpack that looks like it could be an explosive device next to one of the pillars, and they were able to actually do that, and that's not as bad as that is. That's okay. People are going to use a hammer the way they want to use a hammer. There are limits to how much, to the extent which, if you want to give a useful tool to lots of people, you have to accept that there's going to be some risk of people abusing it.
What was kind of surprising to me was that they don't. There doesn't seem to be any sort of a tag or ID or EXIF information that is automatically added to this image so that, when it leaves the environment of the phone, there's a way for another app to tell oh, this was AI generated, this is a suspect app, a suspect image, forensically, but there should be a way to simply flag so that Instagram can simply say oh, by the way, this is AI generated. Even like a feature where you can just press a highlight button, it will just mark in orange all the sections of this that were not actually captured by the camera. That seems to be the minimum responsible thing to do when you add a feature that's this powerful.
0:54:19 - Leo Laporte
There I put her in a field of flowers. How about that, nice? This powerful there I put her in a field of flowers. How about that nice? Yeah, I mean I. I guess what we now have to think is um, you know, what you see is not what the hell is that? It turned the cat into a flower. Okay, it's a daisy cat, uh, what you see anymore in a picture. But I mean, we've that's been that way for a while, hasn't it?
0:54:44 - Andy Ihnatko
and not just that, not just that, but how many times have, like social media, been faked out, not by a fake image, but by? Oh well, you said that this was uh like, uh, people storming the airport, uh, to get at this political person who's trying to leave. It is an authentic photo. Nothing about it has been edited, but it has actually taken 11 years ago about fans that were greeting like a soccer team that's coming in for an airplane.
So yeah, part of this part of the uh uh, part of what we need to learn as a society is here is how media works. Don't necessarily trust facts. There's only one version of faxing you know it's so easy forever.
0:55:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's so easy, anybody can do it.
0:55:25 - Alex Lindsay
Now, right, and that's the real issue is that, yeah, matthew brady moved dead bodies around in the civil war to tend for, for, yeah, when he's taking pictures, you know, like right, yeah so I mean it's. This has been happening since the beginning yeah, I learned.
0:55:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I learned last year that they're actually like dating to thes. There are books for photographers on essentially how to do Kardashian-type effects, here's how to slim a waist, here's how to remove age lines and wrinkles, here's how to make a figure a little bit more prominent, and the idea that not only it's not a surprise that such things were possible, but the idea that this was such a popular thing to do that here are a whole bunch of libraries on the techniques to do it.
0:56:10 - Mikah Sargent
So paintings, if you're painting a royal, you had to figure out what the royal actually wanted in their portrait.
0:56:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what they thought they looked like.
0:56:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, what they thought they looked like, or else.
0:56:20 - Leo Laporte
So you better be careful it looked like, or else, so you better be careful. Uh, and apple, according to uh o'grady's power page, who is actually talking about? Mark german's report. But if you don't if you don't pay for bloomberg, you have to read it on o'grady's power page and we like o'grady, so that's fine. Apple has begun testing for m4 based max for october, including I, and I love this picture, uh the idea of a uh apple tv sized mac mini, which would make me so happy. We talked about this last week. The four max feature base level m4 chips, three of the max have a 10 core, cpu and gpu. The fourth machine, eight and eight. Uh all four of the m4 max uh seen, uh have either 16 or 32.
Idea that I can have a unified memory looks like 16 will now be the minimum, but we we've expected that I love the idea that I could have a backpack full of like a little render farm that is like little mac minis and just you just plug them all in.
0:57:16 - Andy Ihnatko
It'd be so cool all right, we're going to like, given how like tight the the special effects and filmmaking community is. Like you go into starbucks starbucks does not know that like you just simply put your backpack down and like are reading reading something on your phone and you simply plugged in and they're, they're, they're, they're basically rendering a scene for the next avengers movie in your backpack because you've got like 32 of these things duct taped together we used to joke that I mean someone, uh, I think electric Image actually wrote, if I'm correct, electric Image or Maxon, just as a joke, wrote the renderer on a Palm pilot, and we were, you know, just to show that it would work and we thought it would be fun to have you know.
0:57:55 - Alex Lindsay
back then I'm making a video of like hundreds and hundreds of Palm pilots doing it, but this is actually. I mean, you could build a render farm with those you know for simple stuff.
0:58:06 - Leo Laporte
that would do a lot, you know I got that raspberry pi 5 you're talking about last week, andy, I got it, already came. Uh, I got it from kennecott. Yeah, and uh, this is a little kit. It's pretty nice. That's a little sweet little little thing. Yeah, do it.
0:58:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been using mine for the new, the latest raspberry pi 5 it's a.
It's a lot more expensive than like the we were used to. Like the 30 bucks does the basics things. This is designed one of the first where they're aiming at like regular desktop performance, uh, but in addition, like built-in Wi-Fi. There's, yeah, it's, uh, there's. So there's so much of a community behind it that if you do want to do a render farm out of these things, they know how to. Here's how to here's how to make a cube of them, how to do a completely parallel processing computer just by simply adding more layers to the stack, and it's actually charging now, which is nice.
0:58:56 - Leo Laporte
Don't have to use that micro. I can now throw out all of the micro USB chargers that I have but to give you a sense of scale here. It is next to my fat head, I mean, this thing is in a case.
0:59:16 - Andy Ihnatko
It's also a great iPad accessory, like, if you want to, basically by plugging into the HDMI input and using it as a display or by doing a remote access into it.
I've often traveled with one. If I'm in a situation where I actually need the full bore Microsoft Office with full file access and a whole bunch of other more desktop type of things and I kind of feel like being a bit of a rebel, yeah, I can just throw this Raspberry Pi in a nice case into it, use it as a headless device and just use my iPad as just a keyboard input device and display for it, even running alongside other apps. It's not a conventional way to use it, but the great thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it'll do whatever you want it to do, including just being a terabyte of movies, tv shows and CDs and albums to listen to while you're traveling for a month which is something I've done before like here's my media server from hotel room to hotel room to guest room to guest room, uh, but yeah, it's a. It's fun to have that kind of power, like just in a deck of cards, at a price where it's like you may as well just buy one yeah, it was so cheap.
1:00:17 - Leo Laporte
I thought well.
1:00:18 - Alex Lindsay
I'll just buy it. I I do think that if, if they, if the price went down with the size um, I don't know if it will, but it's really a mac mini at 299 or 349 or whatever yeah, it's super interesting. I think apple could sell, because that, that replay, I think for a lot of people, even though it's a little bit more than their apple tv, getting one of those that is just now on full purpose, you know, like that just becomes your apple tv and you put it and I think if they, especially if they had Apple TV mode, it can act like an Apple TV or you can push out and go. I want to go into the, you know, into the OS. You know, I think that that is super compelling. Wow, I would absolutely.
1:00:55 - Mikah Sargent
You just wow, you're just speaking by the language now, cause I was going to say I was almost on board, but I love my Apple TV and its UI, so if it did both ooh, buddy, yeah, I'd be buying those for sure.
1:01:07 - Andy Ihnatko
And just think about if they could get it down to a regular price of $349, but it's like $279 educational pricing. Because if there's one thing, that, as a person who haunts government auctions, if there's one thing a school system has, has it's monitors that are not doing anything and keyboards and mouses that are not doing anything, and the ability to simply populate an entire lab out of like well, I mean a couple of thousand dollars plus, like emptying out a locker full of stuff that they were going to auction for 10 bucks anyway.
1:01:37 - Alex Lindsay
That's yeah, and my son just started multimedia in in his school and they're using 2017 imax. You know, and you're just kind of like, you know, this computer, these little pucks, could be so much it doesn't fix the monitor problem, but it would be probably 10 times faster than what they're using right now. Yeah, yeah, well we'll watch.
1:01:53 - Leo Laporte
We're fantasizing at this point, but yeah the, the.
1:01:56 - Andy Ihnatko
The german report is talking about a higher end mac mini and 14-inch macbook pro, as well as the 16 inch MacBook pro.
1:02:04 - Leo Laporte
I am running right now on a two M one Mac minis. The zoom call is on a Mac mini and I have my Mac book pro here, but I would love to replace even the small Mac minis with something even smaller.
1:02:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, Joe, I I've. I have been shooting myself in the foot for the past four years waiting for the next really exciting Mac Mini refresh to come up. We talk about this so often that we could get into another 30-minute love fest if we let ourselves do so. But yeah, there has been an empty space where my Intel i5 Mac Mini used to be that is waiting for an M4 multiple. The first one, that's M4 multiple display, doesn't cost nearly as much as a Mac studio that can afford to kind of top it out a little bit. It's 100% in alignment with my desires and needs and this just in.
1:02:57 - Leo Laporte
By the way it's pronounced Mac min.
1:02:59 - Mikah Sargent
I Okay, oh my God, just want everybody to know it's min I. All right, we're going to.
1:03:02 - Leo Laporte
I just want everybody to know it's min I. All right, we're going to pause and come back with more. Mikah Sargent filling in for Jason Snell this week. We thought we'd lose him next week for the Apple event, but no, we lost him a little bit early. He is not I should say he is not at an Apple briefing, as much as I'd like to pretend Weekend, to pretend we can't next year, yeah, uh, but uh, jason will be back. I think jason will be back next weekend. I hope he'll be back for our september 10th mac break weekly to talk about the new iphones. Meanwhile, michael sargent, so great to have you filling in and he and rosemary orchard, his partner from ios today, will be hosting our coverage of the september 9th event that's great.
1:03:39 - Mikah Sargent
Looking forward to it.
1:03:40 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, really, really pleased to hear that. Also, andy and I co wgbh in boston when you're going to be on gbh again uh, not this week, but week after next, on thursday at 12 40 pm. All right, you'll have something to talk about by then. Definitely, uh. And of course, alex lindsey 090.media for his day job, but his passion is office hours.
1:04:04 - Alex Lindsay
They're both my passion. I mean the 090 stuff that we're doing I oftentimes can't talk about, but it's pretty exciting.
1:04:11 - Mikah Sargent
I'll be able to talk about it a little bit later when it comes out.
1:04:12 - Alex Lindsay
There's a lot of crossover between the two, but we're doing some pretty stuff I can't talk about right now, but the fall will be very exciting for us, so there's a lot of fall. What's happening this? No, I just I work a lot in theaters, so just keep. Most of my work is done in large theaters, so so the uh, I always stream stream to theaters, so anyway, so so just just watch the news, it'll be, fun, um, and then the uh, you put way in the center, no, no, no, like movie theaters movie.
So yeah, so that sounds interesting. So that's what there's a lot of what I work on.
1:04:45 - Andy Ihnatko
So I just, I just had a thought, and I don't even want to air it, because either either yeah okay, so anyway, we'll.
1:04:50 - Alex Lindsay
We'll be able to talk about it more in the future. Yeah, yeah and so, uh and uh. But oh, by the way, the stream with the verb pipe is. We moved it. It was going to be today, it's going to be tomorrow and we're going to do an interview with Brian Van Der Ark, the lead singer for the Verve Pipe, tomorrow from Sweetwater. So that's actually where they're playing the Sweetwater Mill Valley, which is, by the way, a great venue, and then we're also going to try to stream the concert.
Brian's the band has given me the okay Stream the concert to the Apple Vision Pro from a phone. So, but we're gonna have wiring, we're gonna have like production, audio and stuff like that. So that's gonna be, hopefully, tomorrow evening. If you're interested in watching out in the Apple Vision Pro, make sure to go to streamvoodoocom slash spatial sign up. You'll get an email with a link that says hey, go here and it's gonna be again. We're shooting, people are loading in and no one's ever done it before and once I put the phone up there, I can't go back and get it because there's gonna be people underneath it. You know like you know, there's gonna. Hundreds of people are gonna be below it watching the actual concert where's the phone gonna be on the ceiling.
So there's a in the uh, in uh. We did a walk through yesterday in this in um in sweetwater, which has been around. You know it's, it's a storied oh, it's a great concert hall, wonderful. So sweetwater music hall and they have a. They have a lighting pole that goes across about 10 feet out from the, from the uh, from the stage, and we're like, can we, can I hook something to that? And they're like, yeah, you can do that, so and so. So we're gonna. I'm building the clamp system today and so we'll we'll clamp it up there and what I'm gonna do is we'll do the interview with brian um and then you'll we'll run over and put it up. 15 minutes left, we'll do the interview with brian um and then you will run over and put it up. For 15 minutes left, we'll put it up and and move it around a little bit and hit stream and uh, and you should see um, you should see the band uh doing its thing. So, from perspective, you've never seen.
It is. I mean it's. I don't think anybody's ever tried to do a whole concert to an apple vision pro from a phone. So that's going to be. You know, the best part of when a new product comes out is you get to do a whole concert to an Apple Vision Pro from a phone. So that's going to be, you know, the best part of when a new product comes out is you get to do lots of things first.
1:06:49 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay single-handedly providing the bulk of content for the Vision Pro headset.
1:06:56 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think it is an area like, well, we're really excited about, I mean, the phone, and we're hoping that 16 is going to go to 4K per eye you know, and which would be amazing.
1:07:09 - Leo Laporte
There's also a rumor that the iphone 16 nothing and that we'll have, uh, because it only have two cameras. We'll have them spaced and and positioned in a way to shoot spatial video.
1:07:15 - Alex Lindsay
I sure hope so yeah, it's really fun. You know I it's not as 3d as the real world, but because the inner axle, inner axial, is a little too close, but it's very comfortable to watch in 3D and so when you're shooting stuff of your family or something close up, something within 10 feet or so, it's a pretty amazing experience.
1:07:35 - Leo Laporte
So it should be a lot of fun it's not as 3D as the real world, but it's close.
1:07:39 - Alex Lindsay
It's close, it's close, it's good. And again, as we get ready, there's more cameras coming out in the fall and spring, and so this is kind of us kind of prepping and figuring this stuff out.
1:07:51 - Leo Laporte
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On we go with the show, Luca Mastri retiring or maybe not retiring, but he's, he's transitioning. He is. You may not know the name, but if you listen to Apple's analyst calls, you'll hear his voice. He's chief financial officer at Apple. He's been there for more than 10 years. How long has he been CFO?
I actually don't know about 10 years, since 2013, I think, okay uh, he is going to apparently, according to the apple press release, continue to lead the corporate services team and real estate and development reporting directly to Tim Cook. I can't tell if this is a lateral move. It doesn't feel like a promotion, no maybe it's just he has more time to spend with his money yeah, I, I.
1:11:35 - Andy Ihnatko
It feels to me like the sort of I've got, I have I, I have like a hundred million dollars. Uh, I have plenty of time in my life to enjoy my life. There's a transition that's been planned for. The person replacing them is the VP of Finance that's been around since another 11 years. He's been working very closely with him for pretty much forever.
There has been a line of succession that obviously has been very, very carefully and deliberately drawn up and in place for a number of years and he's going to stick around the company long enough to make sure that the transition is a very smooth one Subtext to analysts and investors. That's not like there's going to be a jarring transition or anything like that. And it's maybe going to be like a Johnny Ives sort of thing where he's given sort of a thoughtful, he's fading out, he's going gonna stick around for another year or two and do a thoughtful thing where he does not necessarily have to show up at the office all the time, but he still has. He still keeps his dental plan and it basically so that he fades away over over time after after a very, very long, long time.
1:12:40 - Leo Laporte
I have this vision that he came in. He went into Tim Cook, says, tim, it's been, it's been a long time, I'm tired. I've got more money than I need. I'd like to. I'm gonna quit, I'm gonna retire. And tim locks the door, okay. Says how big a check do we have to write you luca? And luca says no, seriously, seriously, I'm done, I'm done. All right, look, I got an idea. You stick around, you'll run our real estate. I don't know what that means, and mostly, I think probably oversee Kevin. Is it Parikh Parekh, the new CFO who will be taking over?
1:13:14 - Alex Lindsay
January 1st, I think. Tim said I've got two words for you. I dental.
1:13:21 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's true, you can go on Medicare.
1:13:24 - Alex Lindsay
If you walk away, you walk away, you just can't get it.
1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
You just can't get it. You just can't get it.
So, congratulations to Luca Mastri. You know when Jason comes back we'll ask him of his impressions, because he hears Luca on those calls all the time, the calls he usually leads. Yeah, kevin Parekh has been at Apple for 11 years, leading financial planning and analysis, gna and benefits finance and investor relations and market research. Wow wears a lot of hats. Before that he led worldwide sales, retail and marketing finance. He began his tenure at Apple leading the financial support of Apple's product marketing, internet sales and services and engineering teams. He's worked all over the company before that at Thomson Reuters and General Motors.
He's an electrical engineer with a BS from Michigan and an MBA from the University of Chicago, so obviously another overachiever. Tim said who can we get that will never quit.
1:14:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Because we make a joke about how, as if, oh, finally, now that I have more than $100 million, I can finally, no, apple's top end is filled with people that could have retired 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 years ago and still had more money than any well, any three pop stars but let's say, pick any 10 of a list. There are three of them that they're making more money than collectively. Okay, they can do whatever they want. The fact that they they decide to stay in a very, very high stakes, high tension, uh job, like running a two trillion dollar company that is a political force, not just a technological force, in a societal force. That says something about what their priorities are and how much they enjoy the game and how much they want to stay in it.
I always wondered. It was never a moment that they decided okay, this is it, this is the last draw, I'm definitely quitting. They must have had a feeling for the past three or four or five years and it just felt like the time was right now to make that transition. And again, it's not like when Apple acquires a company and, oh mysteriously, the CEO of this company they acquired decided to leave Apple after five years. I wonder what happened after five. Oh wait, that's when all the benefits, all the stock that they were able to get, like they were able to be able to cash out yeah, not, not, not a lifer, but people like these again, there's a reason why they came and there is a very gentle reason why they left and we're assuming that that real estate is not going to be interesting.
1:15:59 - Alex Lindsay
Apple may have something that they're doing, that there's lots of things that Apple could do with the kind of money that they have of building new things and and buying new things, and so it may be something that may be what he wants to work on, like oh I gotta buy that.
1:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's build a city, building a city in solano.
1:16:14 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe just buy it, yeah yeah, there's all this land in solano, california. We can just we can turn it into appleville there.
1:16:22 - Andy Ihnatko
If we trigger an earthquake here, suddenly it's all beachfront real estate. Millions will die, but our portfolio will expand by eight times what they learned, what they learned sounds like uh property.
1:16:36 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of interesting the billionaires uh were buying that up and uh, they had a ballot measure, uh, slated for November, to let them, to, you know, turn it into a city because it's it's zoned agricultural. And they pulled it. And the thinking is they didn't have the votes and they didn't want to, they didn't want to jeopardize the thing by having a, by voting on it, and everybody says no, yeah, so they're going to put that off.
1:17:00 - Alex Lindsay
So that's. There's a. There's a reason everyone builds in in nevada uh, arizona and texas. You don't need those. It's a lot. It's a lot more fluid in Nevada, arizona and Texas. You don't need those. It's a lot more fluid. Yeah, especially Nevada. So they probably just picked the wrong state, yeah.
1:17:13 - Leo Laporte
Whoops, whoops. They wanted to be close to the Bay Area. Yeah, we don't have any Vision Pro news, except that Apple's number one competitor in this space, meta, has decided not to do its's apple vision pro competitor their high-end mixed reality headset. This is from the information. They've canceled plans for a premium mixed reality headset, according to two meta employees. But they are working on actually, I think, some much more interesting things. The device, codenamedenamed La Jolla, began development last November and was scheduled for release in 2027. Ultra high resolution screens using micro OLEDs, which is the same thing as the Vision Pro. Meta wanted to keep the cost low, like below $1,000, but that was looking harder and harder. But they are going to have the uh, the meta connect conference is coming up. Is it when? Is it john ashley? Is it october? It's coming up pretty soon.
It's the end of september so okay, end of september we'll cover it, because I think their rumors are they're going to announce uh augmented reality glasses and the new orion uh quest. They have some very interesting stuff to announce. So maybe they've just decided we're going to stick with a low end and let Apple uh take.
1:18:34 - Alex Lindsay
I think that what Apple did with theirs is really hard. And so, yeah, if you get too close to the price, you'll suddenly get compared to Apple and I think that that headset is really hard to, really hard to reproduce. You know, like it's not, it's not a trivial amount of of uh, technology to make that work, and I think that they probably the market isn't big enough up there for two, you know, and and if you get too close and everyone just goes, well, I'm gonna use the apple. I think. I think that's the hard part. Until it got, until the market gets considerably bigger, I think apple kind of took the top end and is going to keep it.
1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
Or Meta agrees with me that there is no market for that, that you should work on augmented reality. They apparently will reveal these augmented reality glasses. They're doing pretty well with the Ray-Bans. These will be Ray-Bans. The Ray-Bans right now don't have screens in the lenses. This new one will I'm not sure if they're going to They've done in the lenses. This new one will will cover uh, I'm not sure if they're gonna. They've done in the past a couple of keynotes on the 25th and 26th of this month. We will definitely cover it because I think they're going to make some announcements that will be important yeah, and I agree with you, leo, I don't think that it's that.
1:19:38 - Andy Ihnatko
oh well, gosh, we've been scared into the low end because we can't do things as well as apple.
I think that they saw apple as a competitor.
I think they saw that once Apple entered things, once Apple entered this market, they would open up a market for competition in the high end.
They would create the need and the want for something, this high end and when they found out that even with the low expectations the reasonable expectations that were set for the Apple Vision Pro it's not causing any waves whatsoever, that it's not something that is worth the amount of time, money, innovation and passion that would be required, when they seem to have a hit on their hands with something as simple as let's get a good-looking pair of glasses and put a decent camera and decent microphone and integrated speakers into them and sell them at a price that people can afford. Let's make a VR headset that is not the world-beater, but it is price that people can afford. Let's make a VR headset that is not the world beater, but it is something that people can afford and it does some very, very useful things. I think that they just realized that let's make money where we can make money, as opposed to hope that a market develops that still has not been proven.
1:20:40 - Leo Laporte
John Ashley, they are demanding in YouTube and elsewhere that we play the jingle, though we really didn't have this, the stories for it, so go ahead, play the vision.
1:20:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Pro jingle vision pro, oh, vision pro vision pro please don't go.
1:21:12 - Leo Laporte
I was worried that Quincy Jones might go after us. The guy who made this said you can't copyright Walking Base, you just can't. The Connected keynote we'll watch with great interest the Connected keynote, when Mark Zuckerberg tons his ray-bans and uh and shows us the newest uh thing. I think it's gonna be very interesting and I'm I'm a big believer. I really like those ray-bans. Actually, I'm kind of a big believer in what uh, yeah, what you could do with ar.
1:21:38 - Alex Lindsay
I think that I think that if you are able to get, if you're, the screens will make a big difference, because I think that one of the things that that I really miss from the Google Glass is being able to see what I was shooting, you know like, and so it's one thing to say I'm shooting, but it's another thing to be able to error, correct and look at what you're doing and showing some being able to show something out in front of you. So I'm pretty excited to see how that goes as well.
1:21:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, again, accessibility is just the thing for me. It's like it's nice to, and this is just a general rule. I mean, I absolutely appreciate all the engineering that went into the Vision Pro. However, if it's something that one can only regard as an object from one side of a piece of glass, its impact can be shopping and saying and saying does this is? Does does this snack have like too much, a lot of sodium in it or way, way, way too much sodium in it? And how will this, if, if I have, if I have, this for dessert, how's that going to affect my blood sugar for the rest of the week and simply get an answer from it? That's the sort of stuff that makes changes in society.
1:22:47 - Leo Laporte
that's a good thing, information says.
1:22:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Despite the hype meta is hoping to generate with its debut of augmented reality glasses, they won't be available for public release for several years so it's a preview yeah, it's like here's what we're thinking we'd like to do yeah, it's like this has been making waves on social media about oh, we're going to change the world with what we're going to be showing off in our next AR VR thing, which does make you think that, okay, someone built him a one-off prototype and he wants to show it off. And that's exactly what Microsoft used to do when they used to keynote at CBS.
1:23:20 - Mikah Sargent
I was thinking of Microsoft too.
1:23:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they used to show off all kinds of one-off things that they built. That would get you maybe excited about the idea of a portfolio-style PC, but that's the last you'd ever see of it and they never had any real intent. They would be willing to help out Dell if Dell wanted to actually build such a thing, but they had no strategy for actually supporting it with software or APIs or engineering and you just say, okay, that's nice, it's like a talent show.
1:23:46 - Leo Laporte
I feel like Matt is a little more committed to this space.
1:23:48 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, yeah, oh, no, no, exactly. But it's like announcing something that you intend to make in a few years is different from yeah, no, we're ready to show it to people, because now we have to give it. We have to start giving it to developers and giving it to engineering partners you're going to find out about it anyway is they can give people like a year's heads up. At some point, when the game's all over, when you have to start filing things with the FCC because you're actually going to be taking these things out of the labs, that's when the secret's going to get out anyway and you can start to control the story. It's just that these things were hey, here's something that we built, here's something that we're thinking of.
I've had my heart broken in Google keynotes about this so many times, about yeah, that would be nice if this thing that you show actually working were an actual product, knowing that you bought the company that makes this type of glasses and you haven't done anything with it except for prevent anybody else from being able to buy these promising sets of glasses. Thank you very much, google.
1:24:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean they will also do. It is rumored that Ray-Ban update Ray-Ban Spectacles 2, which I'll probably buy. I liked the the first ones.
1:24:48 - Andy Ihnatko
They were actually sounded really good I might, I might actually go in on those yeah yeah, I mean, they're really just kind of like airpods with with lenses.
1:24:57 - Leo Laporte
I'm still waiting for my brilliant labs glasses, by the way. Uh, I don't know where the hell those are. Those were supposed to be ar. They had a hacking event over the weekend, so I think they have some. They just don't have mine. Anyway, we'll watch. One of the things that Microsoft pioneered against their will, but pioneered was the browser ballot in the EU. Looks like Apple's going to do the same thing. To meet the requirements of the Digital Markets Act in the EU, iosos 17, 4 and later will have a choice screen that provides an additional way to choose the default web browser. So, but is this really, uh, a different browser or just a different skin on webkit? No, this is well, this is. It's just a different browser.
1:25:47 - Mikah Sargent
I'm just going to say at least I shouldn't say that immediately it's going to be the case that it is a different browser, because it's going to depend on those individual developers, or yeah, firefox, oh thanks apple.
1:25:59 - Leo Laporte
Now I have to do two different browsers, that's I think they declined um. Apple says up to 11 up to 11 of the most downloaded browsers on ios in that country in the prior year.
1:26:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Prior year will be in the ballot yeah, there's the uh digital markets acts act. Uh requires them to not have a default browser, but to the first time that someone launches a browser, to give them a menu of different options and allow them to download options. So there's that. There's also a new help page in the Apple developer page to basically show web developers and others how that's actually going to work. This is part of a whole bunch of stuff that they've put in just for compliance, including the ability to actually uninstall apps that you don't want or don't need anymore.
I think the only two apps in the EU after this is done that you won't be able to delete is the phone app, and I think there's another one, but I can't remember. Sorry. Only the settings app and the phone app will not be deletable, but you can change defaults for messaging phone calls, apps for messaging apps for phone calls, spam filters, password managers and keyboards so that you don't have to make sure that all of your messaging traffic is handled by Apple messages. You can actually set a different default for that from home on in the EU eu I wonder if any browsers will make.
Will make the mark, you have to have 5 000 downloads I.
1:27:32 - Leo Laporte
I bet it'll be a ballot with one choice.
Yeah, a couple two, two different renderers, that's, that's, that's an improvement, I guess I guess, uh, apple is uh still standing in the way of epic's app store. According to emma roth and j peters writing in the verge um, remember that epic's new ios store I think it is on the phones now right, yep, it debuted last week, uh, but it's not clear, says the verge, whether epic will be able to grow the store beyond its own games. Uh, bob Roberts, developer of Roundguard, an independent game studio, says it just seems like a lose, lose, lose for Apple developers and consumers. It makes life more complex and confusing without really improving the situation the way the folks imagined it would.
1:28:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, but where's the explanation of what that means? You know which, what is?
1:28:29 - Leo Laporte
you have to have money to sell a game outside Apple's App Store. You have to pay 50 euro cents per user per year for installation over a million, right, yeah, once they reach a certain number of downloads a million then they'd have to pay any fees charged by the operator of the new Marketplace. In Epic's case that's 12 12, so you'd have to pay epic 12 instead of 30 to apple, but you still have the developer fee from apple.
1:28:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, yeah, plus a 10 commission to apple on sales of digital goods and services made on any platform, including third-party app stores and platforms beyond I iOS.
1:29:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, an additional five percent Commission on purchases from new customers.
1:29:09 - Mikah Sargent
So it starts that up to 30 percent what do you know?
1:29:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I bet, I bet Apple. That's a complete surprise to Apple. So we're. I guess we're gonna have to find out, like what the what the EU thinks about this, because they Apple can propose this and Epic can say yeah, this is not, this is compliance by virtue of a middle finger. This is not actual compliance. And if and if so, the EU can basically say straighten up and fly right. Or the EU can say sorry, you wished on a monkey's paw. We gave you what you asked for, not what you wanted yeah, it's that.
1:29:44 - Leo Laporte
It's that uh hated core technology fee and that apple's charging. That, I think is, is bothering people for epic, even if it's getting stung twice by paying install fees on both an epic games store download and a fortnight download. That's theoretically, at at most, one euro per person per year, and you know they could probably afford that. It's the non-epic developers who who are unlikely to be able to want to take the risk, especially if you have a free app you know, it's not just these above the line fees too.
1:30:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's going to be requiring auditing and basically all this, all the bookkeeping that they do in the app store. They're pushing, they're expecting you to do and provide them with reports, and so that's going to have an expense in the forms of staffing and time. That is also going to be causing a lot of people to decide. Why do I want to invite such pain upon myself? I'll I'll. I would rather the the Apple App Store is a poke in the eye with a blunter stick than actually going through outside the App Store well, especially when maybe you're going to get to 5% of the market.
1:30:48 - Alex Lindsay
Like, maybe if you're lucky, you might get up to that level. All of them together is probably going to be 5% of the market.
1:30:55 - Leo Laporte
The Verge used Apple's calculator to configure an app with more than a million downloads and $150,000 in annual revenue. We give nearly half of that to Apple on top of the 12% commission you give to Epic, so there's not a lot of profit.
1:31:07 - Andy Ihnatko
nearly half of that to apple on top of the 12 commission you give to epic, so there's not a lot of profit in all of that what bumps me on is that this this could be an opportunity for not just, not simply for a company like epic that thinks it's paying too much money for apple to apple for what services that they get in return, but the idea of I want to. I want to create an app store that a parent would have absolutely no problem allowing their kid to have access to, because every single app that's been approved for this app store doesn't allow in-app purchases, it doesn't have explicit content, it doesn't allow connections outside of the app all this sort of stuff, and no matter what kind of qualifications you want to put on this app collection, the ability to limit an app store to a certain user if you're a parent of that user, that's a very, very powerful thing. So I'm sorry that this is not going to lead to that kind of flourishing different apps.
1:32:00 - Mikah Sargent
I think you're describing Apple Arcade.
1:32:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but again it's Apple. And what if you don't want?
1:32:05 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, yeah, but again. But I think the problem is and what if you don't want? Yeah, I think the problem is that, as a parent, I mean I have to approve all of my kids, uh, purchases on their phone, um, and so as a parent, I'm just kind of like, well, that'd be good enough and it'd be hard to get out of get. All I'm saying is I, I, I do think that there's an advantage to what andy's talking about. I just think that good enough is oftentimes the the enemy of great, and while that's a great solution, good enough will have most, most parents going. No, it's close, you know.
1:32:30 - Leo Laporte
So of course epic doesn't have any stake in making this a success. They've. They have every, every interest in making it look terrible. But they did say epics in app. They said they're in active discussions with just about every single one of the top 250 mobile developers about putting their games in the epics a game store. Almost all of them said they can't make it work on ios because they would be paying too much to epic and to that they're happy to be given apple 30 percent.
They don't. They want to get more. But that's what that's.
1:33:04 - Alex Lindsay
You know it's 30, it's 30 and it's easy, you know, and it's, you know I think that's part of the deal too, and it's and or it's 15 until they get to a certain threshold, and then it's 30, but it's easy for them to do like everything's kind of sorted out like. This is not just that it's not very much different, it's that it's a lot more work for almost no, no difference yeah, yeah, but let's look before we close.
1:33:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's just note that apple is making it difficult and they're making it. Oh yeah, it's all coming from apple, yeah absolutely.
1:33:32 - Leo Laporte
It's the core technology fee of 50 euros or 50 euro cents, uh, it's. Uh, it's the additional commission you have to pay. I mean it just all adds up. Epics 12 is is just a drop in the bucket compared to everything else. Uh, let's take a little break. You're watching mac break weekly with andy inako from gbh in boston. Uh, global, uh, office hours. Global, uh, mater d, master of ceremonies, mc mc.
You look like lindsey welcome and be an event you got to do the eddie redmayne weirdness, uh and uh. And of course Mikah sargent, the wonderful Mikah sargent from ios today.
Thank you for filling in for jason snell and we thank especially all of our club TWiT members. I see you, I see you in our club TWiT discord and I want to invite more of you to join. It helps us a lot. We I think we've done our part. You know, here I am sitting in the attic instead of in a studio, because we save thousands of dollars a month by doing that, moving everybody to work from home. John ashley, our producers in his, in his uh uh, are you wearing shorts, john? Uh, are you wearing?
pants at all of any kind. That's good for them. It saves us a lot of money. We my point being your membership fees are put to good use, not to my salary, not to lisa's salary, but to keep the shows on the air, to pay our great hosts, uh, and we're not paying the electric bill, uh, to you know, for that big studio anymore. So I would like to still invite you to join, because we still need the support seven dollars a month ad free versions of all the shows. Just scan the qr code in the upper left of the screen or go to TWiTtv club TWiT. Lots of events coming up. Uh, it's you know, because of, because of our club TWiT, we're gonna do that photo walk in new york city on september 7th. It's, you know, because of because of our club TWiT, we're going to do that photo walk in new york city on september 7th. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Where are you doing Mikah's crafting corner next? Is that coming up?
1:35:34 - Mikah Sargent
that is just around the corner. Let me see that just around the corner. Ha, that is the 18th of september, 18th, yay.
1:35:43 - Leo Laporte
And what will you be crafting?
1:35:45 - Mikah Sargent
So currently we're working through a little miniature kitchen, and so I've built on every session a little bit of this kitchen. Oh my gosh, this is the first piece. I know the focus is off, but, and you have the Ask the Tech Guys fireplace in that kitchen? I do, don't I yeah right there, and so we've built kind of one module. Each time we're all learning new words too, because they have these really funny uh words that they use as part of the manual. So it's been a great time but you can also knit crochet.
1:36:17 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, people are doing their legos in there exactly.
1:36:21 - Mikah Sargent
You bring your own craft. We all just hang out and chat and have a good time.
1:36:26 - Leo Laporte
We did coffee last week with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. I did a special. I want to do more of that from the studio. We're going to play some games. Paris Martineau is going to lead a. What do they call it when you have a group in a game? Lead a squad through Baldur's Gate 3. I will be the one in the back.
Hold up wait, wait hold on, wait a minute, I'm coming, so that'll be fun and lots more. You can be part of that too, like if you want. We want to have some fun in the club, but we also want to have you in the club. So please visit TWiTtv slash club TWiT, and we thank you so much for your support. Uh, let's see what else is going on. Ted lasso might be back. I thought we were done with uh believe, but you believe hard enough. Ted rugby, rugby.
It's like three of the original core cast members have agreed, so it looks like a season four. Green light boy hannah waddingham is coming back. Brett goldstein, who is roy kent his story is interesting. Yeah, he's like the pretty, was the producer and screenwriter, script writer, right, and they said, well, who could play roy kent? He said I could. And uh, jeremy swift. Who's that funny little director of football operations, leslie higgins. That should be a lot of fun. I hope they get more than just that, but uh, no, no, no word about whether ted lasso himself is available. Wait, is sudeikis going to come along?
1:38:06 - Alex Lindsay
jason, he is a producer.
1:38:08 - Leo Laporte
How about coach beard? Where's brendan? Is he going to come along?
1:38:12 - Andy Ihnatko
he's he did. He did stick around, like in the last episode, so he didn't he didn't go with with uh, you have the core staff.
1:38:17 - Alex Lindsay
You're kind of like what are you gonna, what are you gonna do next? Like yeah, what you know, this is as good as it gets apple has come to talk to you about being on a show, I mean, yeah, I might, I might put off a little bit of time. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, it's not even like a whole year. I mean, you know, shooting these things is like probably four or five months of the year. Right, you can take the rest of the year and I'm sure the craft services are excellent.
1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So you're gonna get well fed. Party, that's the word, not squad, thank you oh, I should have known that's what you meant.
Thank you out of sync. What was I thinking? You see, I'm already a doofus. Uh, apple apparently, according to the new york times, is rethinking its apple tv movie. Continue setting up your subscription? No, I don't want to, I just want to see the story. New York times. Good Lord, it's thinking everybody, everybody's begging now, including Leo. So Apple rethinks his movie strategy. After a string of Mrs Wolf's, a new film starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt was going to get a robust theatrical release, but they're curtailing that plan.
1:39:24 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the problem is is that movies are a horrible business model. So you know, and making them for streaming doesn't make any sense at all. You put a bunch of extra money into it and then what you do is you play it once the series make way more sense. They, you know six episodes, eight episodes. They're just from a holding perspective. We have to remember. I mean, when you get back to like, why are you doing this? You're doing this so that people keep on paying every month. If you have things that they watch once, it doesn't make it for streamers. I don't think that movies make a lot of sense, you know, and, and so I'm not sure if that makes sense. I don't know if movies will be here in 10 years.
1:40:01 - Leo Laporte
The director, john Watts, really, as the stars really wanted a theatrical release. In fact, clooney said in an interview with Deadline.
Last year, brad and I made the deal to do that movie where we gave money back to make sure we had a theatrical release. John Watts, the director, told Vanity Fair he found out about the change in plans from Apple days before the announcement. Yeah, I always thought of this as a theatrical movie. He said we made it to be seen in theaters. I think that's the best way to see it. But I think you're right, alex, that's not acknowledging the, the, the financial issues.
1:40:34 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, the reality is, the box office has not been very pretty for a lot of folks and and it's something I pay a lot, a lot of attention to so they will put it in theaters, so it can be nominated for an oscar.
1:40:44 - Leo Laporte
Right, it's going to have its debut at give it a week the venice film festival. It'll be in a limited number of movie screens for one week. Then you'll be able to see it september 27th yeah, but that's not.
1:40:56 - Andy Ihnatko
That's not like how you get like brad pitt and george clooney to like do something, do something for your, for your streamer, because they they do see them. They there, they do still see absolutely quote, real movies, unquote are seen in real theaters and they don't just get a nominal release just to qualify them for for award season. They actually get the, the audience actually gets a chance to actually see it in a proper movie theater as a communal event. And so, yeah, that's kind of particularly after having given back money in order to guarantee that, to not have that and also to find out about that days before the rest of the world, that's got to feel like you've been very, very minused by a three trillion dollar company and that's no good. But fly me to the moon like the last one, like because it says it says here it costs 140 million, uh, and made back like uh 40 cost 100 million and grossed a million, 40 million.
Yeah, I mean in theaters though yeah, right, so it makes some money from apple, I presume yeah, so they got.
So they got to feel like we're not, we're not our business of actually releasing movies, to releasing movies in real theaters to actually see audiences. Audiences are not coming to see them, for whatever reason. And rather than solve the problem of why are we picking movies that people don't want to see, probably the reason is that they tend to make movies that feature high profile people who want to make great movies and have a good eye for, like, I don't want to say quality filmmaking, but a type of movie that is not necessarily populist in nature, that a small amount of people are going to absolutely love, necessarily populist in nature, that is going to that a small amount of people are going to absolutely love, as opposed to a good movie that a great many of people just kind of like, which is how you make a billion dollars off of a $300 million investment.
1:42:35 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that the issue really, if you look at killers of the flower moon, they say, well, it was a failure, but it wasn't. They offset. They made something for Apple TV plus that and they offset the cost by selling and selling to theaters for a while. So so they, you know, they get some back and some of that money back because of that. They didn't need it to be successful because they built it for their streaming service so that's my question you understand how this all works.
1:42:57 - Leo Laporte
So the times says killers of the fire moon cost 200 million to make theatrical release, 157 million worldwide so they have a deficit here of you know, 43 million, but but that doesn't count. Apple gave them money and does Apple make money?
1:43:13 - Alex Lindsay
I mean how does this?
1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
work. Where does that 43 million?
1:43:15 - Alex Lindsay
so if Apple makes some killers of the flower moon, I mean, martin Scorsese wants to see it in the theaters and and it's. You know, that's how you get Martin Scorsese right. Uh, you make a 200 million dollar film that you probably would have made with Martin Scorsese anyway for the streaming service. They would have been happy with having Martin Scorsese do one for the streaming service, so they don't care. I don't think it matters to them, martin cares. And it does impact.
1:43:39 - Leo Laporte
I mean is it mostly an ego thing, the heart.
1:43:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, no, no no, no, it's an old. There's a lot of structure there.
1:43:45 - Leo Laporte
They also have points, is that it?
1:43:47 - Alex Lindsay
Well, people get back ends on it, so they'll get some money from that. But also the other issue is is that the way Hollywood works is? What was your last successful film and what were the numbers, and are you quote?
1:43:56 - Leo Laporte
unquote bankable, I mean.
1:43:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it is going to all change. I mean, this is like. The problem is is that almost nothing is successful now, except for a handful of it, and it almost seems random at this point of you. Know, you need 10 to 12 tent poles to pay for everything, and we're not seeing that many a year anymore, and so everybody's figuring out what to do next. You know, and no one really knows which way is up. Um, things have been slowed down because of the writer strike and the actor strike, but even with that accounting for it, things have just slowed down what do you think the number one box office movie in the us was in 2024.
1:44:27 - Leo Laporte
just take a wild guess deadpool oh no, inside out too.
1:44:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, how'd you know? Because I was as amazed as anybody else.
1:44:35 - Leo Laporte
It's not like I would never have guessed that it grossed 646 million dollars. Yeah, yeah, you're right deadpool and wolverine number two. In fact, it got worldwide.
1:44:47 - Alex Lindsay
I think it was more than a billion and I think that's arguably, uh, ryan reynolds right. Well, ryan reynolds is a marketing genius and and I think that he and his wife uh got two successful movies out and they made a lot of people upset. Yeah, um, uh, blake lively and ryan reynolds teamed up and had, you know, the closest thing they could do to a Barbie Heimer. You know what was her movie it was? Oh, it was a. It was a very serious film that she made. I think she got a lot of friction for it.
1:45:17 - Mikah Sargent
They kind of had fun with it.
1:45:19 - Alex Lindsay
No, not Twisters. No, not Twisters.
1:45:20 - Leo Laporte
It was. I just want to point out almost all of the top 10 are sequels Inside Out 2, Deadpool and Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, Doom Part 2, Twisters, Godzilla, Kung Fu Panda 4, Bad Boys, Ride or Die. Some of these are the terriblest movies ever. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and A Quiet Place Day 1, which is a sequel to A Quiet Place.
1:45:43 - Alex Lindsay
The hard thing here is that when you look at those numbers, then you have to look at the budget of um these films, and multiply that budget by three and that's how you make money. So if you don't, if it's not more than three times how much the budget for the film was, you probably didn't make any money, cause there's promos, there's backends, there's all the, you know, there's the money that the, that this is a gross, but this is not what the theaters get. Some of that, not a lot, but they get some of it. So so you got to make three, x, the, the, the budget to turn to, to, to go positive, and so the and. So the issue is is that the um that almost none of those were positive, like oh, you know, they you know, and so there's like three or four positive films this year and that's not enough to keep the thing going?
1:46:25 - Andy Ihnatko
what?
1:46:25 - Mikah Sargent
what is the I mean? Just because it was bankable for a long time?
1:46:28 - Alex Lindsay
no, what? What happened? I think I mean everybody's got their own opinion about it because everyone's trying to figure, you know, read the tea leaves and what's happening here, because it's it's, you know hollywood's on fire right now, but part of it is is that, is that the on fire in a bad way? Not, yeah, not, yeah on fire, yeah on a bad, in a bad way. It's burning up.
1:46:46 - Leo Laporte
It's burning money Like the movie.
1:46:47 - Alex Lindsay
Inferno. So, anyway. But the issue is that because the people who pay for these are not artists, they're bankers, and so they're looking for things that are bankable. And what happened was that they saw like, wow, all these heavy effects, heavy action, heavy marvels and everything else Expensive, these are bankable. Like every time we put money into them, there's a multiplier that comes back to us. And so what happened was all this focus started to go on those and, at the same time, streaming started pulling all of the all the other stuff out. So streaming you know, if you're doing a romantic comedy or you're doing something that's a little bit more heart touching or you're doing you know something that's a little more experimental streaming was like, hey, we'll pay for that, you know, like we'll fill up some time with that, and so. So all of that kind of went in another direction.
And and then the other issue is, is that during COVID, all of our habits changed. People started watching lots and lots of movies at home. When they went back to the films, they were like, wow, this is a lot of money, like I haven't paid for this for two years. This is, you know, and we had inflation and everything else, but we were like this is like when I go to, if I take my kids and my wife to the, to the, it's going to be $150. Like that's what's in my head my the, the tickets, the popcorn, the, the parking, the, you know, bridge tolls and everything else. I'm really nice system at home I can buy that film and watch it. And now 85 inch screen TVs are $800, $900. And so the ability to have something that is not that much different than a, than a uh, especially for if you're into artsy films or into other things which I like, and those are probably more I watch more of those now than anything else.
Um, there are a handful of films I was trying to explain to my uh, my son, terrence Malick. I was like we turned on the thin red line and I was like I can't really show you this. I opened it up and I was like I can't show you on the screen because you can't understand Terrence Malick and how he shoots If you're not in a theater like you just don't. You don't understand the film, like it doesn't even like I watched it and I couldn't believe that and I was like, oh right, I was in a big deal, so, so and and, but it's it, and so there are those, but I think a lot of them bigger tv, alex?
I? Well, here's the funny thing is, the other place that I can watch them is the apple vision pro, because I can have a screen as big as what I was what I watched them on and it actually looks better than it did when I watched it in the theater you know, and so that's the future, you know, apple does think so you got the problem that directors and actors are older directors and they want older directors and actors.
1:49:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they want hot up in this because they don't feel like they get enough bang for their buck. And they might they might be right. I mean, it doesn't bone, but it's also part of the next salary right, it's.
1:49:19 - Alex Lindsay
the next thing you're talking about around the table is, though, this one did really well, or we did this, and so there's a whole pomp and circumstance that that stars are used to, and they, you know, there's a red carpet, and there's Q and A's, and there's all the things that happen around the film, and the issue, though, is that it's just.
I don't think that, you know, I don't. I don't think it's going to come back like in the way that it ever did before. I don't think it's ever going to recover. Recover it may still be there, but I think that there's, and the issue is it doesn't have to drop to zero. If it drops about 30 percent um over the next two or three years, that the, the, the theatrical system doesn't work anymore because there's over here.
1:49:59 - Leo Laporte
There's cost of doing this. You know you're not going to make any money so the biggest movie of this month was the instigators the matt damon casey affleck movie. Uh, one week of limited theatrical release. But then apple tv and according to parrot analytics, it added 50 000 subscribers just to watch that movie. Uh, and that's you know that pays that.
1:50:21 - Alex Lindsay
That pays for apple. That's an annuity, you know right, because it's they're. They're getting x amount of dollars from that 50 000 every single month right, they're able to if yeah okay, keep on making it yeah there's some churn, there's some dippers, you know
1:50:34 - Leo Laporte
but I guess, you know, maybe we always hear about the people say, well, I'm only going to join and watch the instigators, then I'm going to quit. But honestly I never do that. I try people think about it. They're going to do that, and I just think that you all are being a little bit um we're not as cheap as you are, Mikah.
1:50:51 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's not me, I'm not cheap. When it come, I will like if there's an ad that plays during a show, I will go buy them. I'm not cheap when it comes to watching stuff, but I think that you may be a lot of touch of, uh, people who don't, who live paycheck to paycheck is what I'm right, and they have to really race in their streaming, yeah, yeah so they'll get netflix for a month but they're also not going to.
1:51:11 - Alex Lindsay
They're also not going to the theater either no, no, yeah, no, I'm not saying in comparison to that, yeah I'm just saying that I think that that's the challenge and I and I think that it is, uh, it's going to be a continued challenge for hollywood and I don't know, no one has an answer. Like, everyone keeps on talking about why. Everyone's just trying to figure out what's happening, um, and no one. Everyone has some people have opinions of the solutions, but, you know, over the next two or three years we maybe this will magically turn around. Um, you know, marvel's got a big plan with lots of um products coming out, but, uh, it seems like it's a pretty uh, pretty so, and if I'm Brad Pitt and George Clooney, I might not be too mean to Apple.
1:51:51 - Leo Laporte
They paid each of them more than $35 million for the film.
1:51:56 - Alex Lindsay
In lieu of a back end.
1:51:57 - Leo Laporte
In lieu of a back end.
1:51:59 - Alex Lindsay
No, because you know, in some of them you know.
1:52:01 - Leo Laporte
So the ego wants the theatrical release, but the pocketbook got what it wanted, well, maybe.
1:52:08 - Alex Lindsay
So the issue issue now in this case um, you know, it depends on how it's released, like. So, if you do that for killers of the flower moon, it's unclear whether dicaprio would have made the same amount of money, because it didn't, you know, do that well in the theater. I did well, but not enough. The. The issue is is that, um, if, like matt damon has talked about in the past, he's, he, he's the one that turned down the most money in the history of movies, because he was doing Jason Bourne and, uh, james Cameron offered him 10% of the gross on, uh, no, he just felt like he was even finished filming, born, but he felt like there's going to be pickup shots and he was really committed to the process. He was, he had integrity as an actor to want to make sure that the film had everything that it needed to be successful, and so he said no, it's like $250 million that it turned down.
1:53:02 - Mikah Sargent
And he always knows.
1:53:04 - Andy Ihnatko
He's doing. Okay, he can order. He can order one block on his burrito without asking if it's an expert. Exactly I think I think he can get it.
1:53:11 - Leo Laporte
Youtube says motion pictures killed. Vaudeville television threatened. Motion pictures streaming will kill motion pictures. Yeah, it's just the way of the world and I think that they killed the radio star.
1:53:22 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, yeah, I something killed radio, I don't know. I think that the. I think that one of the things that I think about now is as I go to look at what I'm going to play in the evening. Two and a half hours to me seems like, oh, that's a big commitment, like you know, like I don't know where I'm going to put two and a half hours compared to we started watching, uh, the new Kevin Costner, uh, star vehicle horizon right three hours.
Yeah, we have so far spent three nights watching pieces of it and I and I and I, I would rather just be packaged up into you know so. So for instance, I you know, like I you know we might watch two of them, but I like them in those bites is one hour bites and like I might watch two or three in a row with better beats. I mean, this movie has some really good beats.
1:54:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm watching the terminator 2 by half hour incre and, like I might watch, just make movies with better beats, I mean and this movie has some really good beats. I'm watching the terminator 2 by half hour increments while I work out and it has some nice beats. You go through action scene and then there's a quiet scene and you pause and you come back then the next action scene and you pause it. You just need good beats so that people can chop it up at home.
1:54:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, that's what I'm chopping up. That's so.
1:54:28 - Alex Lindsay
I'm a script doctor in my part-time you know, I do, I do think, and and I think martin scorsese saw it the other way like I can just give you a three-hour movie whenever you want, but I'm gonna I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna give you what I wanna, and I do think that there's an opportunity to be more creative in the streaming world than there was in the theatrical world, because there's so much risk in the theatrical world, um, in a level of, if apple were going to pay for it, you know they're, they're going to pay for it and it's going to, you know they're going to be able to do it, you know, like time says you saw all those ads for wolves on the on the olympics, right?
1:55:00 - Leo Laporte
no, no, you didn't. They. They, they were going to advertise it like crazy on the olympics. They had a huge budget. Uh, they canceled it days before the olympics. Uh, began at the last minute. Uh, usually.
1:55:17 - Alex Lindsay
Usually that's a, that is a company deciding that it isn't as good as they thought it was gonna. It's a bad movie, right, like they just go. Oh, you know that, money's just not gonna, it's not gonna take, you know that if you spend the money before the reviews come out, doesn't that overcome?
it. It's not. Yeah, it's. It's hard, though I mean it's that's the you know that's the risk, but but that is the um, that's the danger, and it's actually one of the advantages of streaming is that you put something out and everyone will watch it before they see.
1:55:44 - Leo Laporte
I think they got burned by fly me to the moon, which, uh yeah, I mean that they talk about star vehicle channing tatum, scarlett johansson and, and you actually saw ads for it.
1:55:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not as though they got everything promoted.
1:55:57 - Alex Lindsay
I thought it was I have to admit it was very hard for me to think about watching because it's such a third rail. When you talk to people in space, I didn't want to watch it yeah, it was just like oh the idea of moon landings, like even talking about that is like.
1:56:09 - Andy Ihnatko
That's like I don't know if I can watch that, don't even, oh, it's just, it's just the idea of like not just this, like bootstrap operation, backup was like no, the according to the storyline, like let's approach an actual like astronaut, say, by the way, we're gonna train you to do the fake one that we're going to film, in case we feel like I don't see an actual military person, like going along with anything like that. As much, as as much as they were, the ads made it look like a light-hearted, like romantic comedy, sort of Merry mix-up sort of thing.
1:56:40 - Alex Lindsay
It's like I I'm just not sure I I have I buy this enough to actually and be a good audience and they even they even made the reference, because of course the the, the conspiracy theory is they hired stanley kubrick to do the, to do the fake landing, and there's a whole myth, mythos related to that and and they even referred to stanley kubrick oh, we couldn't get him, or whatever in the in the trailer and I was like I don't want to watch it.
1:57:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm right with you.
1:57:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'm not offended, I'm just like I. I can sense that I'm not gonna buy just like I, just like I never.
1:57:12 - Leo Laporte
I never saw snow, I never saw snow piercer for the same reason, because it was like Capricorn wanted the same uh plot and didn't that do all right? I, everybody, yeah well, that will.
1:57:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, I'll in 30 seconds or less. It's different, because the professional astronauts weren't in on the scam until they're on the tower. Why are they opening the door and hustling us out and then they explain something to them on the way back down? Okay, I can understand them. Now they're in kind of a jam and they have to kind of go along with it.
1:57:40 - Leo Laporte
The thing to watch will be F1 next year, the big Brad Pitt vehicle on Formula.
1:57:49 - Alex Lindsay
One Lots of money. I mean, the thing about Apple is that they can spend all the money they can go. Hey, we're going to just spend into this project at a level that most people aren't doing.
1:58:03 - Leo Laporte
Watch and see if there's a big ad campaign or if it goes straight to streaming. I think the world is changing yeah, it's not.
1:58:10 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not like they love spend. Just because they're worth a few trillion dollars doesn't mean like they love spending money on things that are kind of failing. So I could I could see them in deciding that this was a good plan, like when we're trying to get things launched. We're trying to get attention to ourselves without having a massive library like Netflix, without having connections to an existing entertainment brand like Disney. Let's try to offer some of the best filmmakers. Let's attract them to Apple TV Plus because we're going to give them the budget and the freedom for the projects that would never be approved by mainstream Hollywood. And now that they're seeing that's not really paying off for us the way that we hoped it would. Maybe they'll still spend 200 million dollars, but now they're going to spread it out amongst a few 60 60 million dollar projects, as opposed to rolling all the dice with one high profile one, like like napoleon show them to us at the beginning of apple events, like that that's where they show them off.
1:59:04 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I don't, I don't think that, uh, like that's where they show mom. I mean I don't, I don't think that, uh, I, I don't, I don't think that movies make sense and I mean I just don't think that it makes sense for a streaming company to make two and a half hour pieces of artwork, like I just don't think, and I think that, apple, I think you're seeing them mostly move away from that. Um, and I think that you know, because it just doesn't that, especially for people who are dipping in, dipping out to see something, giving them six episodes or eight episodes makes way more sense, as long as they overlap. Well, that you're going to have something like that that's going to four weeks into your eight week turn. There's another one there that's that you might want to watch.
But I think the other problem that film, film, theatrical distribution as is that, wow, there's so much content and some of it shot, so much of it is shot so well. Tv used to be like, hey, we're going to do this at one-tenth the cost of film per minute. It's not that way anymore. So what you're watching on these streaming things is film. It's film on a and you have a. If you have 4K subscription, you're seeing it at the resolution that you're seeing in the theater. If you have a screen for $900, it's 85 inches You're seeing it nearly the same focal width of that. If you have a screen for 900, it's 85 inches you're seeing it nearly the same focal focal width you know of of that of that of your 10 feet away.
2:00:15 - Leo Laporte
Um, and so the thing is, if your boss's old laser projector uh hey yeah, exactly you know that I'm saying yeah, sorry, I am not your boss, Mikah, I want to try this and just see I I'll do this live. According to researchers, on Wednesday four characters typed into the iPhone to crash springboard. Quote, quote colon, colon, colon. Oh my God.
2:00:41 - Alex Lindsay
What happened? That's all it does.
2:00:43 - Leo Laporte
Crash settings anyway.
2:00:44 - Andy Ihnatko
You know what it's called springboard.
2:00:46 - Leo Laporte
It springs you right back. It springs you right back. It's supposed to put you in the lock screen. Let's try it again. Uh, quote, quote colon colon.
2:00:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, do you have to do curly quotes or can you just do the standard?
2:00:59 - Leo Laporte
well, I think it does the curly quotes automatically. I don't know how to do. How do you do curly quotes? Tap and hold on and hold okay, so left quote. Hold okay, so left quote, tap and hold right quote. It was something happened, but maybe not the whole thing. Colon colon, right, yeah, did you do this in ios?
2:01:18 - Mikah Sargent
today. No, we didn't do this one. We didn't want people it didn't do it. Yeah, no, I guess it doesn't. I guess you can just do the standard one, and it works anyway, does it?
2:01:27 - Leo Laporte
oh, wait a minute. No, I was getting the french quotes.
2:01:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, where's the?
2:01:32 - Leo Laporte
curly quotes I can't, I can't tell. Let me look real closely here he's got to do the thing do the thing. The curly quote I can't even. What the hell. Okay, is that left quote.
2:01:47 - Mikah Sargent
And then yeah okay, now let's try it Now let's try it.
2:01:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to do colon colon while you're watching. Let's see, those are the curly quotes. Colon colon, yeah, it just does that.
2:01:58 - Mikah Sargent
Big deal. Which phone do you have? This is the 15 Pro Max 6.
2:02:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I have the beta.
2:02:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so the beta doesn't fully crash.
2:02:08 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that's the problem. I'm running the beta.
2:02:10 - Mikah Sargent
So kids, don't try this at home, it will crash if you are not running the beta.
2:02:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, it did do something, but not a springboard crash.
2:02:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, go all the way back. But yeah, you just got the simple one.
2:02:21 - Leo Laporte
Apple has no comment. It's not a security bug, says an iOS security researcher. So Ryan Stort, ios security researcher, uh, so, uh, ryan stortz. Also patrick wardle, we know well, uh, says it's not. But you know what? Anytime you can get something to crash, it's concerning watch, steve gibson knows. No, it can. It is the a prelude.
2:02:42 - Mikah Sargent
I was gonna say step one, right, yeah, step one.
2:02:45 - Andy Ihnatko
The good news is it's not like someone can send you like a text message with this and it crashes your phone. No, you have to type it yourself. So but but yeah, mike, I think mike is, you's not like someone can send you like a text message with this and it crashes your phone. No, you have to type it yourself. But yeah, mike, I think you're right Like the fact that the fact that there is something busted in the keyboard input that can cause something dramatic to happen, that means that there is something fundamentally wrong that is worth investigating in case there are other circumstances in which it does something other than give you a fun party trick to show off during a podcast.
2:03:16 - Alex Lindsay
It's probably something I thought it might be something related to it auto-correcting like it's trying to auto-correct and somehow not.
2:03:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm gonna do a death loop. You know like it's just like it when it tries to correct that. Or could be date. There could be data detectors. It could be that it's trying to parse something. It's parse it as a value that it doesn't, that doesn't exist. Yeah, knows.
2:03:34 - Leo Laporte
And David Pierce doesn't. That doesn't exist, who knows? Yeah, uh, and david pierce, uh, from the verge and I fix it attempted to fix a wet phone by shaking it.
2:03:41 - Mikah Sargent
This uh it sort of worked. I think the uh, the uh best part of this whole thing is the illustration yeah, uh, where is?
2:03:46 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if that's david pierce, uh, we've had him on the show, but I I can't that's not an iphone either yeah, it isn't, is it? No? I don't know what the hell it is it's an old, old samsung yeah, so uh, um, this is, uh, it's. It's not a good video, but it's not meant to be. The video is called sound to remove water from phone speaker.
2:04:07 - Mikah Sargent
Guaranteed yeah, they've basically done six seconds of deep low buzzing that makes your phone vibrate yeah, and apparently the apple watch does when you turn it into, you put on water mode and when you turn it off, it does that. Yeah, this is very similar to that, uh, and it was able to squeeze out some water, uh, so if you drop your phone, you can go and play this video and it'll help a little bit.
2:04:32 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm not going to play it.
2:04:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think it was very annoying.
2:04:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I wish we could like spread the word that, like I see I hear from so many people who think that like just because it's IP 68 waterproof, like that's what. That's why, that's why I'm shooting underwater with it, my kids like don't.
That means that, like, if you get caught in the rain with it, you'll probably be fine. If it's in a sweaty pocket, it'll probably be fine. If you drop it in a puddle or in a puddle of water, you can get it out fast enough, it might be fine. Don't think that it's an underwater camera, because it isn't. It's just like adhesives that are holding it together and like, just because it worked like the first week out of the box doesn't mean it'll work a year out of the box.
2:05:11 - Mikah Sargent
so please don't think it's an underwater camera especially the aging part, andy, that's. That's. That's the big thing. Yeah, that adhesive ages and it is not, and every bump and ding and everything else that you've done that whole time is making changes to the way that it is sealed. And so by the time you roll around to now, I'm gonna go underwater with this that might not be a good idea.
2:05:34 - Leo Laporte
Don't use rice either. Do what, alex. Lindsay does and go on Amazon and buy a giant jar of cicada what is it? It's desiccant, desiccant it's like the stuff you put in your shoe's but you can also get it.
2:05:50 - Alex Lindsay
I save the packets. By the way you put it, if you get pa, everything you buy comes out it says do not eat. That's how I know so I don't, it's out of my reach, but I have like a little thing that I keep closed and it keeps they all stay nice and dry.
2:06:01 - Mikah Sargent
You want to just throw them into collecting them, don't?
2:06:03 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, don't eat them, collect them instead but the. But you can buy, uh, cook some, bake, bake desiccant. If you do baking desiccant, desiccant you can get desiccant, that is, you can throw away, but you can also get ones.
2:06:14 - Leo Laporte
They look like little clay balls yeah, you bake it to get rid of the gets the water out right like this yeah, and then yeah oh, I see, so you use it and then you can reuse it after you bake it, because that causes the water.
It sucks the water in, and then you bake it to get the water, but you don't bake it at a high temperature, because then you have desiccant all over your oven. Trust me, yeah, that's no good. Look at this for 979, two pounds of orange silica gel, oh, and they're indicating rechargeable. It tells you, oh, I love that.
2:06:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah why don't you?
2:06:47 - Leo Laporte
do that in a craft project, build that into a pillow, and it could tell you if you sweat too much or something.
2:06:55 - Mikah Sargent
It's like oh, your mouth was not closed overnight like it's supposed to be dang it.
2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
You're watching mac. We see you learn so much in this show. Mac, break weekly, andy, and not go. Uh, alex lindsey filling in for jason snell, the wonderful Mikah sergeant. And now it's time, my, for the picks of the week. Mikah, why don't you kick it off?
2:07:17 - Mikah Sargent
All right, I this week am talking about something that I have just found delightful for all sorts of little uses. It's called the 30X60X Illuminated Jewelers Loop Magnifier. It's called the 30X 60X Illuminated Jewelers Loop Magnifier. It is a small little magnifier from a company called Jarlink and it was nine bucks and it has two LED lights built into it and two magnifications 30X and 60X and I have used this for all sorts of things One, just to look at things up close, because that's fun, but two you have to put it like in your eye socket and squint around.
2:07:53 - Leo Laporte
You do have to kind of go. Yeah, you got to get pretty close to it.
2:07:56 - Mikah Sargent
Um yeah, but I have used it when I uh had some had a usb cable that was behaving oddly and I was able to look up close and see that the pin one of the pins was bent. I've used it to check if different reports are clean. I have just used it for all sorts of things and it's just a lot of fun. It was very inexpensive. I know that the wonderful producer of the show, John Ashley, uses these for verifying Looking at diamonds. I think For verifying the authenticity of um magic cards.
I'll use that for that because they have special little prints on them and so it's a really cool little thing, uh, but I also wanted to mention a show that I have been watching that I think is hilarious. It's called plebs um and it's old right, old right. It is an older show it started in 2013 and ran to 2019, but it's just a group of these guys in ancient Rome who go around just doing normal things as young men.
Yeah, but they're. They're plebeians, and it's so funny. You have to like British humor, which I do, and I just think everybody who likes that kind of humor should absolutely watch this, even just the first episode. You will quickly get what the show is all about, and it's so stinking funny. Through instagram and I uh came across this video and it was like nine uh hidden gems that you should watch, and this was one of them, and I thought I'm gonna give this post a try, and now I'm gonna watch all the other shows that are on there too, because this is so funny, so it looks like fun.
2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
Take, take a modern bro humor and take it back in time. Yes, plebs, really I'm gonna watch it you should three desperate young man.
2:09:52 - Mikah Sargent
There's a lot of jokes too oh, even better.
2:09:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, don't you just love a good latin?
2:09:58 - Mikah Sargent
joke. I love a good latin joke istimundus for amundus.
2:10:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Am I right? Yeah, illegitimate non-carbarundum uh, witty wiki carmarundum uh witty wiki sent their ubi, sub ubi.
2:10:15 - Leo Laporte
Let us pause to just absorb the wonder that is Mikah sergeant. Thank you so much for being here. I'm he hosts. Uh, of course, the brand new hands-on technology which took over for ask the tech guys. You answer a question every month. Every Sunday, 11 am Streamed live, sometimes All the time, I don't know, Streamed live when we're doing question episodes.
2:10:38 - Mikah Sargent
We'll also be streaming live when I'm doing reviews, but it's going to be a little different. I'll kind of say roll that beautiful bean footage, We'll watch the review and then we can chat afterward about the review.
2:10:57 - Leo Laporte
I've got gotta pop by, maybe after I get back from vacation. I'll yeah. Great if you did. Yeah, yeah, uh, thank you so much for filling in for.
2:11:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Jason Snell, andy, and not go. A week from Thursday, gbh is calling. Yes, go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to it live or later and your pick of the week, my friend.
Oh, this is what a treat. A lot of people listening know who Admiral Grace Hopper was, legendary figure in computing history. She basically invented programming languages because she was at the very, very ground. After getting two degrees in math and math physics mathematical physics she basically got in on the design of the very, very first computers. She was one of the first people, usually credited as the first person, who said these things are way too difficult to program. We need a way that we can program this using English language. And was told no, that's not possible, computers only understand numbers. And so she said okay, watch me. And she invented, like the first compiler, the first idea of humans write in a language that they can kind of understand and then this compiler will translate that into actual runnable source code that the machine can understand.
Strength after strength after strength, she has like decades and decades of stories. She was so valuable that like she was so valuable that she joined the Navy Reserves during World War II and stayed in there forever. She retired at a mandatory retirement age and a couple of different acts of Congress she kept being pulled back into work and an act of Congress allowed her to continue to work in the Naval Reserves. There's this legendary talk that she gave in 1982 about computing in general and she tells all of her famous war stories. That again, if you're familiar with Grace Hopper, you're thinking oh, did Paul McCartney play Love Me Do? Yes, he played Love Me Do. Did he end with hey Jude? Yes, he ended with hey Jude. So Grace Hopper tells the stories that you want her to tell. But she also shows you really just how damn smart she is.
1982 that at the apple, apple had just released the apple ii plus. Even the apple ii e had not come out yet they still not ship a computer that does upper and lower case, more than 40 and more than 40 columns of text. And she's already talking about how a lot of people within the military and within corporations are not understanding exactly how useful computers can be, that it's not so much about having one huge computer anymore, so much as it is having a computer at every place where it can be useful. But she's also talking about very forward thinking ideas, that where everyone's talking about how microcomputers might be able to change things but nobody's talking about how important it is to serve not people using the computers but the actual units of information that's being processed, like. If you have a limited amount of processing power, you need to be able to prioritize. If messages are going through a ship, you need to prioritize the message. Oh, by the way, there's a fire and we're going to sink in an hour over. Hi, I'm out of paper clips. You need to order some more paper clips. It's going to be out in about a month. But she spins this into a very, very large story about how the actual power and the actual efficacy of computing is not being scratched at, not only because of limitations like that, but also because of not listening to younger people who know how to do this stuff. She tells all kinds of really great stories.
This was a legendary talk and I've been looking for it for years. Unfortunately, she gave this talk to the NSA in 1982 and it's been classified. Uh, there, there you can. You could read it in like certain people had access to it and what included it in like research papers and there, but I could not even find a transcript of it. Well, monday, yesterday, the NSA declassified it as part of an ongoing initiative of declassifying things that don't really need to be secrets anymore, and so now you can get the entire hour-long talk. It's up on YouTube. But if you go to NSAgov, if you just do a search for Captain Grace Hopper, the title is Future Possibilities Data, hardware, software and People and it is amazing. I listened to it. I watched it last night. Classified for many years.
And again, it's not like she again, listen, I played the whole thing last night. That's not as though she said. And the thing is, we weren't able to get that Russian sub because they were encrypting it with the following encryption key. It's more like this happened on NSA grounds and I don't know. Anything that happens inside this auditorium is by nature classified. I don't know anything that happens inside this auditorium is by nature classified. I don't know what it was. All I know is that I've been looking for this for like six years, ever since I first heard about it, and I've not been able to find a scrap of it. And last night I was able to watch the entire damn thing. Very, very much listened. It's so inspirational, even if you're not interested in computing history.
She's a hell of a public speaker, a hell of a problem solver, a hell of a person to talk about the problems of working within huge bureaucracies and why good ideas sometimes don't make it through.
She tells the story about how like her tactics are. One of her famous things is like it's easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission, because after listening to her for like five minutes, you know that this is not someone you're going to play with in any way, shape or form. But when she tells the story about how well I'm smart, she didn't say it outright, but, okay, I know more than this person who has to approve of this. They're not going to approve this, I'm going to do it anyway. And then when they get to me all angry, I think the quote quote she was. This is also a direct quote. You never, you never saw a person turn into a dumb old lady faster in your life. Oh, I'm so, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry. It's so as entertainment, yes, but also as inspiration and also as ways to get things done within large bureaucracies and also computer history.
2:16:49 - Leo Laporte
You've also discovered a very interesting page, the nsa declassification page. Uh, if you follow the thread back, they've got historical releases from the cuban missile crisis. Uh, gamblers ruin an article by tom lehrer. I don't even, I don't, I don't even know what that is. Uh, tom lehrer was not only a famous musician but also a mathematician. The gulf of tonkin. Oh, here's the declassified jfk assassination. Hmm, we'll just have to come back and, uh, save that for another day, but oops, that for another day, but oops, uh, very interesting, very interesting. The nsa has a whole section on its website.
2:17:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, captain grace hopper, future possibilities data, hardware, software retired as an admiral, but at that time she was just a captain, just a captain and she's but she's already came in that sorry yeah, yeah, thank you so much, andrew.
2:17:46 - Alex Lindsay
Mr alex lindsay, you have a pick of the week yeah, so this was picked, maybe, uh, it seems like three or four years ago. I checked them, backed up uh, mbw picks, but I still think it's worth bringing up again. Um, it's called, uh, polycam and I use it so often and people keep on going whoa, what are you doing? And I think, well, it's time to bring it up again. Um, so I will show you. This is what we're shooting.
As I said, we're streaming from Sweetwater and so I was there and I was like, well, so I can do measurements and everything else, why don't I just capture it? So I just wandered around with my phone and and this is what I end up with. So, you see, this, this is kind of, you know, this is the whole little tiny theater in your face, like a little theater, but I can keep zooming up and I can get. You know, there's a fair, you know, and it's not. It's not perfect, but remember, I'm waving a phone around. You know it's like you're going, you're talking to space, you know, like you're just um, so I'm able to get this and all the information's there too. So like, for instance, I can go, well, I wonder, you know, this is why I do it. I want to know the distance from here to here. Oh, that's eight, eight feet, three inches, you know. So it's not just that, it's captured, the data pretty accurate. Oh, it's really accurate. I mean, it's it's using the lidar, so it's, it's I'm wandering around and so, um, anyway, so it. So.
I used to when I did walkthroughs, I would walk around with a little laser measure and I put it over here and I put it over there, and sometimes I had a. You know, now I just wander around with polycam and I probably do it a couple times a week and I just gather the data and then later we can figure out what is the, what is the cable run there? Oh, we'll go up here. Yeah, we need 30 feet, you know, and, and it's just so much easier because new, new questions come up and it's. And then also, if I send this to somebody, they can open it, and in AR mode you can open it up.
It'll be the same size as it was when I shot it, like, if you have an open space that was big enough, you were in a parking lot. I can send this to you and you can just hold your phone and wander around in it, and so, same thing. You can send it to someone in Apple Vision Pro and then you just go right inside of it. So anyway, it's a pretty powerful app. I think it costs. I think there's some free version, but I think I pay like eight bucks a month or something for it and it's. I don't pay for a lot of subscriptions anymore and this one's worth it. So anyway, that's a call.
2:20:00 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a great app to have on your phone waiting, because when you, as you make your way through the world, you will find an object and you want to take a picture of it. But you really wish you had a 3d of it. And the number of times I've been in a museum or a library or someplace and said I want a copy of that bust, that, that, that that sculpture, and just after like 30 seconds you just have it. It's, it's addictive.
2:20:24 - Leo Laporte
I love it that you can send it drone footage and it will turn it into and that's beyond even what I've done.
2:20:30 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't sent it. That's fascinating. Yeah, I use a program called Drone Deploy or an online platform called Drone Deploy for drone work, but I haven't used that. But I'm now going to because I didn't even know they did that.
2:20:41 - Leo Laporte
That is wild Polycam P-O-L-YC-A-M. What a great pick. Thank you, alex. What's coming up on office hoursglobal?
2:20:54 - Alex Lindsay
uh, our big thing is tomorrow, so I load in tomorrow morning, you know so. So we're going to be uh again streaming brian van der ark um a live q a with a couple songs uh, to the apple vision pro at six o'clock tomorrow evening, nice, uh, if people are interested, they can go to stream voodoocom slash spatial sign up. We'll send you, we'll send you the link um, and then we're gonna try to shoot the whole show. We'll see how it goes. No one's ever done it before, so we don't know if it'll work. So we're gonna um, but we think we have, we, we feel you know positive uh about it, um, so we're gonna do that tomorrow evening. But that's our big push for for this week.
2:21:27 - Leo Laporte
Very cool officehours.global. You can join the conversation. There's a join us button at the top of the page. But you can also look at all the uh videos they've made and we have. You know we have pretty and gray matter dot show for the Michael Kransy show which Alex produces. Uh for Micahel Kransy.
2:21:44 - Alex Lindsay
Anything exciting there um you, I have to admit I've been so focused on my uh, fighting corruption. Yeah, so he, this was great. You know, ethan Elkin um talks a lot about climate. You know climate impact. He's a lead. He's a lawyer related to climate change. Um and um, he's just really good at breaking it down you know, so he, he's, he's good, and we have Jessica Calarco who is going to be on this week.
2:22:15 - Leo Laporte
Nice graymatter.show. Thank you Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Mikah, thanks to all of you for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly live every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch a stream on seven platforms Discord for our Club, TWiT members, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Kick and perhaps Telegram soon. But if you can't watch it live, don't worry, you can always download a copy of the show, because it is, after all, a podcast.
Audio and video is available at the website twit.tv/mbw. There's a Youtube channel dedicated to mac break weekly and, of course, the best thing to do is subscribe. If you go to the web page, you'll see links to a couple of the most popular podcast clients, but you should be able to search for mac break weekly in any podcast client and subscribe. That way, you'll get it automatically and you don't have to worry about when to listen. You listen at your convenience. We'll be back next Tuesday. Uh, thank you all for being here now. It is my solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. See you next week.