MacBreak Weekly 1015 Transcript

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy and Christina and Jason are all here, so am I. Lots to talk about. The reviews are in for the new MacBook Neo, all the details and a closer look at the colors. Can you tell them apart? We'll also talk about the new Apple monitors and why you should under no circumstance consider spending your money on them, and those crazy new TikTok marketing videos from Apple. All that and more coming Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:41]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1015, recorded Tuesday, March 10th, 2026: Who Shot Apple Intelligence? It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. Yes, I'm, I'm back. From Space City, USA. Thank you so much to Mikah Sargent for holding down the fort. Jason Snell is back from New York, New York.

Jason Snell [00:01:08]:
Yes, sir.

Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
Where he is seeing all the new stuff.

Jason Snell [00:01:11]:
I had an experience. Oh, did you? It didn't freak me out. I just had a regular old Apple experience. Although there was a moment where I was chatting with Phil Schiller, as you do, and then John Ternus and Greg Joswiak walked over. Wow. And I thought, What is going to happen to me now? Am I being cornered? And the answer is that Trudy, who's the head of PR, came over and she's the cops. She broke it up. She said, move away.

Jason Snell [00:01:35]:
Why are you talking to this guy?

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:37]:
Get out of here. I have had that hand on my shoulder when I'm talking to a friend, like before the demo area opens, Tim Cook comes over to talk to the friend and I stand my ground because I'm thinking, well, look, I'm part of this conversation. This is the interloper. And then you hear that, you feel that hand on your shoulder and that tug. Hey, hey, Andy, you should be one of the first people in the demo room and I'm going to arrange that for you. I'm like, that's cool.

Leo Laporte [00:01:59]:
That's Andy Ihnatko, ladies and gentlemen, who did not get that conversation, but he's here anyway. Nobody's hand on his shoulder today.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:08]:
Exactly. I'm all alone, as I am in life.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
All alone in this home.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:12]:
Thanks for watching.

Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
And that's the wonderful Christina Warren, whose shirt gives us all a kiss. A kiss. Because she's a Harry Styles fan.

Christina Warren [00:02:22]:
I am. What can I say?

Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
Good to see all of you. So, so Jason, uh, for those of us in the unwashed masses who did not get to go to London, Shanghai, or New York, how was it?

Jason Snell [00:02:34]:
It was so, so when they do an event like the iPhone event in Cupertino at the Steve Jobs Theater, you go into the theater and you used to see people on stage. Now they just play video and then you come out into a big hands-on area with all the products. What they did in New York, and I assume in the other venues, is they took an old, um, in this case, an old warehouse in Chelsea and they staged it. And basically there was an area where we watched the very short video introducing the MacBook Neo, which had not yet been announced yet. I think they released it on their website after we had seen it because I was texting people who hadn't gotten the news yet, right as it was happening. And then when the video stopped playing, this very short video, they basically said, go behind the screen and there's a hands-on area. And it's very much like the kind of giant hands-on area you would find in Cupertino where they had the MacBook Neo, but they also had the iPad Air, uh, M4 that they announced. They had the new MacBook Pro, they had the Pro Displays, so they, and the, and the iPhone, um, 17e.

Jason Snell [00:03:40]:
So they had all the new products with hands-on. And that's, I mean, that's why they invite people to be there in person is so that you can actually see the colors, type on the keyboards, do all the things that you, you know, stare into the XDR brightness, all of those things. And have a personal kind of experience with it. Plus, yes, chat with PR people and executives and other things and ask them questions and get a briefing and all of those other things too. So that's basically what it was, is that it is a giant hands-on area and they had— it was a lot of people. They've done a lot of New York events where it's been a small group that's been invited to this building that they own in Tribeca. And then when I got there to Chelsea, to the warehouse, I realized, oh, this is more like a an Apple event, like a big Apple event. The difference being there wasn't like an hour-long video to play, but it was the hands-on part of it, which is honestly the most important part because that's when you get a chance to look at this stuff first and, you know, get it in your hands, you know, more than a week before it releases to the general public.

Jason Snell [00:04:41]:
So you can start, uh, learning about it, asking them questions about what the difference between processor cores— I'm sure we'll talk about that— is in the, uh, these new M5s. And, uh, you know, the design reasons behind the, the Neo and all of that kind of stuff. So basically an Apple media event without the long TV show at the beginning.

Leo Laporte [00:05:01]:
Nice, actually. Yeah, all the stuff had been announced except for the Neo, uh, right, right.

Jason Snell [00:05:08]:
The Neo was announced at that moment, right? Um, the rest of the stuff was announced the two previous days, or was there— yeah, I think that's right.

Leo Laporte [00:05:16]:
I think they say it would be actually because, uh, The Neo was really the new, new thing. We knew the 17 would be.

Jason Snell [00:05:24]:
That was why they saved it for last and they wanted to give it its own spotlight on that day. But, but I literally on Tuesday at 6:00 AM, I was at the San Francisco airport on a briefing about the new stuff that they'd already announced about the MacBook Pro and, and the new M5 Pro and Max chips and all of that. And then it was like, after that was over, I got on a plane and flew to New York. So it was a, it was a whirlwind.

Christina Warren [00:05:48]:
And then got to see that stuff, pick up your review units.

Jason Snell [00:05:50]:
And well, yeah. And then that's the funny thing about, about it is people are like, oh, are you going to linger in New York or whatever? And it's like, well, no, I'm not going to linger in New York because I know, like, literally I got home Wednesday night and Thursday morning all of my review units came under embargo in the mail. And then I worked all weekend, so I didn't have time to linger. I had to—

Leo Laporte [00:06:11]:
so the embargoes have been lifted for all of the things?

Jason Snell [00:06:13]:
For all. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:06:15]:
Your review was in The Wall Street Journal.

Jason Snell [00:06:18]:
Oh, well, no, my review of David Polk's book was in the Wall Street Journal.

Leo Laporte [00:06:21]:
Oh, okay, not of the Neo book. Okay, we'll say we'll hold the David Polk thing, although the— yeah, the good news is David will be joining us at the end of the month.

Jason Snell [00:06:28]:
He's—

Leo Laporte [00:06:28]:
he was very excited. He used to be a regular on MacBreak Weekly, so it's great. I bribed him with pictures. Bribed or blackmailed, it's, you know, it's up to you. With pictures from the cruise back in 2004, I think it was.

Jason Snell [00:06:41]:
I mean, we're— yeah, we were on— we were all on a bunch of those cruises.

Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
Yeah, MacMania.

Jason Snell [00:06:44]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:06:45]:
Uh, so, um, kids, do you have any questions for Mr. Snell that you'd like to ask him about?

Jason Snell [00:06:52]:
Yes, I know Christina has hot takes about the MacBook Neo.

Christina Warren [00:06:55]:
Well, I do, I do, and they've evolved, but, but I, but I, I, but I, I, I will, I will, um, obviously, like, you're the one who's had the hands-on time, you're the one who's been able to review it. I did have a question, I guess, kind of generally about the colors, because that has been a thing, because I haven't been able to see any of them in person, obviously, um, like, like you showed it off, I think kind of at the beginning, like it looks like it's kind of a lime, citrusy lime kind of color. It's not really a yellow. But I was curious about like the pink most specifically, like, is that like a proper pink? Because the problem with the anodized stuff, like Apple overexposes as they should in all the press materials. So the colors look a lot poppier and brighter than they really are. But, you know, the orange notwithstanding, and that's a really bright color and that, that you know, they had to dye the heck out of it. But the laptop colors, other than the rose gold MacBook from 10 years ago, you know, they haven't really had any that have, I think, what I would call like a really sustained color. So I was just kind of curious like what your take was, like having seen them all in person, because it didn't look like the lighting was great in any of the, you know, hands-on rooms.

Christina Warren [00:08:02]:
And a few YouTubers have been able to do some like unboxing, I think, of some of the stuff, but I haven't been able to look at that super well. So Since you've actually been able to like hold, you know, one of them like in sunlight and other stuff. What, what, what's your take on, on the color situation?

Jason Snell [00:08:15]:
It's true. It's really hard too, because really until you see it in with your own eyes and your own light, it's very hard to judge it. What I would say is I think, I think we may have overstated Apple's renewed commitment to bright colors. Um, it is, it is absolutely the most color forward Mac laptop that they've done since I would say since the original iBook, right? Since then it's mostly been really muted.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:38]:
That's a high bar.

Jason Snell [00:08:40]:
Yeah. But like. The Apple is still very conservative when it comes to colors. Even when it's being bold, it's not that bold. So like silver is silver. I would say that the Indigo is really, it's a different shade and it's a little lighter, but it's so familiar if you've used a Midnight MacBook Air. It's a, it's in the ballpark. It is your default dark laptop.

Jason Snell [00:09:02]:
If you prefer a dark laptop to a, a light silver laptop, it, it, gave me all the Midnight vibes, even though it's a little bit different. And that leaves us with Blush and Citrus. So Blush, look, I am mildly, but I definitely am red-green colorblind. And so when— Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah. So when I saw the Blush at—

Leo Laporte [00:09:24]:
What was that? Is that thunder?

Jason Snell [00:09:26]:
I don't know. Somebody taking the trash out? I'm sorry.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:29]:
I just, I muted my mic too late. It is now warm enough that the people who like to go up and down the coast on motorcycles are going up and down the coast on motorcycles.

Jason Snell [00:09:36]:
Oh, okay. Oh, interesting.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:37]:
I'll be faster on the mute. So when this is one of the reasons why often I prefer to go to the library generally. Go ahead.

Jason Snell [00:09:42]:
That's fine. So when I saw the blush saying that, I, so I'll tell you, so I had a girlfriend in college who I asked why she had, why she always wore gray socks and she said they're pink. And I was like, oh, see, that's a problem. But so in the, in the hands-on area, I looked down at one of the NEOs and I thought to myself, oh, that's pink. So it's not just a trace of pink because I could see it, right? Yeah. But it is also not bright pink. It is, pinky silver. Um, so, so like, I know we're threading the needle here, but Christina, what I would say to you about the pink is it's probably not as pink as you wish it would be, but it's also, I would say, not as restrained as like, remember the sky blue MacBook Air that they introduced last year?

Christina Warren [00:10:24]:
That, yeah, it's silver. It's silver.

Jason Snell [00:10:27]:
I can see blue and I couldn't see that blue except in certain angles and certain light. So the citrus is by far the most bold of all the colors. Even so, it's not like tennis ball yellow. It is this yellow-green. It is— I took a picture, you can go to sixcolors.com and see. I took a picture of it with a lemon and a citrus tree, and you can see that it is not gonna hold up to that lemon, but it is, I would say, brighter than like a gold. It is a bright gold, yellowy, yellowy-greeny gold. Citrus is a good name for it.

Leo Laporte [00:11:01]:
Is this picture true to the color?

Jason Snell [00:11:03]:
Yeah, that's, I think that's pretty good. That is sunlight, direct sunlight in the afternoon in my front yard. It looks so green.

Christina Warren [00:11:09]:
Yeah, I was going to say.

Jason Snell [00:11:10]:
It is, it can. So depending on the light, and this is the trick with all these anodized products that are metallic, it really depends on context and the angle of light. Sometimes, sometimes the sky blue MacBook actually does look blue, but most of the time it doesn't. And in this case, yeah, it is not all yellow. It is, there's a yellow tone and a green tone, and then it is more saturated. It, so it stands out like you will never mistake this. For any other Mac laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:11:36]:
It's kind of ugly if that's the color.

Jason Snell [00:11:38]:
It is. Yeah, it is. I think it's cute. Um, honestly, I think it's nice, but the thing is, yeah, again, even this is more restrained than you might expect. This is not a cosmic orange iPhone. And like, look, I applaud Apple because what they're doing is they are trying to do some different things to see if they can appeal to a different audience. Cause this whole product is about appealing to a different audience. And I, I want them to.

Jason Snell [00:12:02]:
I want them to succeed because I would like to see them offer color options, right? And not make everything like all you can do is boring. They'll always offer a boring option, right? People who like boring computer colors, do not worry, they're never going to not offer you silver and a dark something or other. Like, they're never going to not do that. But if we want them to do a, do a brighter color, you know, it's going to come down, I think, to Citrus and Blush even to see, how it goes, but like, it's, it's, uh, so it's fun, but don't, let's not get overboard. I think we were all expecting neon, uh, iPods at this point, and that is not what we got.

Andy Ihnatko [00:12:38]:
And besides, besides, I think the trend right now is we, we, we used to live in a, in a wonderland where you could get a bright purple, like plastic cover for a cover case, which would suffocate your device and take 3 years off the life. And now people just cover it with people who like Flash will cover it with stickers. Anyway, I've got a big David Bowie sticker on, on my MacBook. Uh, I'm sorry for the rumbling. Uh, What I want to know is that, like, if I would not— if I had a pre-release one, I would not be out of the room before I would be trying to really put the hurt on that A18 processor.

Leo Laporte [00:13:11]:
Did you— yeah, okay, really hard. Wait, I want to finish the colors, then we could talk about performance and what's the guts of it. But let's finish the color.

Jason Snell [00:13:20]:
How long does this show go, like 4 or 5 hours? Sure, we got all the time in the world.

Leo Laporte [00:13:26]:
Uh, I just want— I want to make sure So everybody understands, I guess, you know, most people go to the Apple Store if they can and look at it before they buy it.

Jason Snell [00:13:33]:
That's the best choice, best choice.

Leo Laporte [00:13:35]:
'Cause not everybody can. What's interesting is the colors are sold out pretty much, but the gray is not, the silver is not. People want color.

Jason Snell [00:13:45]:
I think so. I mean, this is the question.

Leo Laporte [00:13:46]:
I hope they're not gonna be disappointed.

Jason Snell [00:13:48]:
I will say, I think the iBook taught Apple a lesson that they have, that I wish they maybe hadn't learned so well, which is I think Apple believes that a laptop is a functional piece of machinery and it's a, and unlike your computer, you take it out in the world with you to all sorts of contexts, business meetings at the office, in a cafe, whatever. I think they got a lot of pushback from iBook buyers that they felt like they didn't want to stand out. And that's why when they redid the iBook, it was just, it came in white. And since then it's been white, black, silver. You know, dark gray, like they, they have not gone back to colors. I think because they're concerned that people don't actually want their laptop to be colorful. We will find out, I think, but I think there's a lot of desire for people to show off a little more of their personality and maybe the lessons that we learned in, what was that, 2001, 1999. I mean, maybe people have changed too a little bit and the culture has changed and we're less afraid.

Jason Snell [00:14:48]:
To show our personality with a computer in a cafe or something in 2026? We'll, we'll find out. But I think that that is, um, that's the question. Also, this is, I think this laptop is going to be bought by totally different people who buy MacBook Airs and certainly MacBook Pros. And, and so we don't know what their behavior is going to be and how it lines up with somebody who might buy an Air or a Pro.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:09]:
Yeah, I feel, I feel like the problem is more like it's so, it's so many different SKUs and they know that there's going to be two of them that aren't not going to, that are going to have their fans but are not going to sell very well. So let's be conservative and at least make it— make— give ourselves the best chance of not having to figure out, okay, we gotta— we gotta— we gotta source another 6,000— 600,000 Citrus Ones because we didn't make enough of those.

Christina Warren [00:15:33]:
So yeah, no, I mean, honestly, this is like— and we'll talk more about it as Jason talks about, um, his review and the guts and, and some of the trade-offs and whatnot. Um, but I've been kind of going back and forth, like, am I going to buy one of these things to just use as a thin client or not? And to be clear, I don't need this. I have no reason to buy this, but like, but I want a pink MacBook. My, my, my rose gold MacBook is 10 years old.

Leo Laporte [00:15:53]:
It doesn't work.

Christina Warren [00:15:54]:
It hasn't worked in, you know, like, like 6 years, you know, like that, that was one of the poorest supported laptops Apple ever had. But that's also kind of my fear a little bit with, with the, this first Neo, but I'll save that. But part of my reason for being like, okay, because part of me, I'm like, okay, I could just wait a year or whenever they do the refresh. We don't know if they'll be doing yearly refreshes or not. I tend to think they might just because they will have been you know, like, you know, 18 chips for, you know, for this year that they might, you know, be able to want to repurpose in future iterations. So I could see this being an annualized update. But to Andy's point, you know, they like to switch these colors out and they don't, they don't always make the right bets in terms of what they're going to be buying. Like, you know, that you have to have kind of your silver and maybe like your darker color, right? And that's what your institutions will buy.

Christina Warren [00:16:46]:
But for the fun colors, they can rotate them in and out so quickly. So there's a part of me that has FOMO where I'm like, do I have to just freaking buy this just so I can have the pink MacBook? I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:16:59]:
I had a pink case on my MacBook Air.

Christina Warren [00:17:02]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, no, honestly, that's not a bad idea. And honestly, brought up a good point too. People put stickers on them. You can get skins from dbrand and things like that. But it's not the same. It's not the same as having the color-matched keyboard and all that stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:17:14]:
It's also the case that— if you have that, people know you have a new— the Neo, right? You'll have a newer— I mean, that's what the orange is.

Jason Snell [00:17:21]:
It will not be mistaken for any other Mac laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:17:24]:
All right, well, that's color, but let's talk about the guts because that's maybe a cause for concern a little bit.

Jason Snell [00:17:31]:
This is an A19 Pro, so it's from the iPhone 16 Pro, but binned. It has one fewer GPU than the iPhone 16 Pro, which does mean since it's a binned chip from more than a year ago, it's kind of free, which is probably why Apple built a cheap computer on it.

Leo Laporte [00:17:52]:
Like, uh, one of those Rubbermaid buckets of them and just said, let's make some of these.

Jason Snell [00:17:56]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:57]:
So basically management is telling, is telling TSMC, boy, this new Neo is a big hit. So obviously we want the highest yields possible, but maybe not the highest, highest yields possible because we need some crummy A18s.

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
From a couple of years back that Apple actually had a very sweetheart deal with TSMC. Not that they would have that anymore now that TSMC is in such high demand, but At the time, TSMC paid for the failures for the first 3-nanometer process.

Jason Snell [00:18:23]:
That was the deal they made.

Leo Laporte [00:18:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. So maybe these really are free.

Christina Warren [00:18:29]:
I doubt that. But to Jason's point, I mean, I think that like, yeah, they already paid for them, probably had to rerun them again. What else are you going to do? You just disable the core that's not working. That's what they do with the E, you know, series now. They are using the binned versions of the, I guess, the 17 chip in the 17E, or I guess the 19 chip, whatever version on. Um, but this does give me hope. I'm hoping that maybe this will be an annual upgrade because they're still going to have bend.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
Oh yeah, they'll have free chips every year.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:01]:
Exactly.

Jason Snell [00:19:01]:
From last time.

Leo Laporte [00:19:03]:
What about now?

Jason Snell [00:19:05]:
Yeah, go ahead.

Leo Laporte [00:19:06]:
Yeah, go ahead.

Jason Snell [00:19:07]:
That would mean— that would mean— that would mean the next year it would have 12 gigs of RAM instead of 8 gigs of RAM.

Leo Laporte [00:19:11]:
We'll see that. Okay, so we're getting a much better machine. So there are two SKUs, but the SKUs are, uh, storage, right? Storage and the Touch ID button and the Touch ID. Otherwise they're identical. You get 256, 512.

Christina Warren [00:19:25]:
Is that right? Yeah, they couldn't spend the extra 50 cents to put in the Touch ID sensor.

Jason Snell [00:19:29]:
Yeah, that's differentiation.

Christina Warren [00:19:31]:
Oh no, I know that's why it is.

Leo Laporte [00:19:34]:
There's no technical reason they couldn't have Touch ID.

Jason Snell [00:19:36]:
I don't think so.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:37]:
$100 more, you can have it. I can't imagine life without Touch ID.

Leo Laporte [00:19:40]:
I know. Well, it's also a security— well, plus it's a non-clicky, uh, the, uh, it's a physically moving touchpad, which is interesting.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:48]:
Yeah, especially for, especially for a cheaper one. Like, I'm sure that it's— I'm sure that the mechanical buttons are rated for the life of the product, but life's mishaps, dusts, and given— well, given that, given that this is going to be a lot for, for kids and students, they tend to be a little bit more rough. And so I think that the break— the breakability is— I think it's going to increase breakability, but not so much to make someone say, you know what, I'm not going to buy my kid a $600 laptop, I'm going to buy my my kid an $1,100 laptop, right? It's not that big, but let's— no, at least it's a notable thing.

Christina Warren [00:20:20]:
I don't, I don't think it's a big deal.

Jason Snell [00:20:21]:
Something—

Christina Warren [00:20:22]:
but we didn't even have the glass touchpads. I think what— the first one we had that was with the, the original MacBook, wasn't it? In 2015.

Jason Snell [00:20:28]:
Yeah. So it's this, this keyboard and trackpad give strong first generation iPad Pro Magic Keyboard vibes, right?

Christina Warren [00:20:37]:
Where it is—

Jason Snell [00:20:37]:
probably what it is. It, it is, right? So it's not a, it's not a hinge diving board trackpad. It depresses equally all the way around. So it's kind of a floating with a metal, uh, underneath. I think it's probably pretty, um, reliable and hard to destroy. Um, and then the keyboard is a Magic Keyboard. So I think it's very, very familiar. And I, I did a lot of work.

Jason Snell [00:20:58]:
Now I think the modern iPad Pro Magic Keyboard actually has a haptic, but the old one didn't. And it was, it was perfectly good. So it was good.

Christina Warren [00:21:06]:
It was $350. It should have been perfectly good.

Jason Snell [00:21:08]:
Yeah, exactly. It was practically half the cost of this thing.

Leo Laporte [00:21:11]:
So yeah. So the chip that's in it can only handle 8 gigs of RAM.

Jason Snell [00:21:16]:
Yeah. That's what it's made with. And that's how they do it. It's a phone.

Christina Warren [00:21:20]:
It's a whole package.

Jason Snell [00:21:21]:
It's a whole package. Yeah. There's no choice. I, I, I've seen, it's funny. I've seen some criticism of this that comes down to things that it just shows how we think of computers is different from phones. The people are like, I can't believe they didn't put 12 or 16 gigs of memory in. And it's like, The chip has the memory on it and it's 8 because that's what they made for the iPhone. And next year's chip would, if they go to the next year iPhone chip, it'll have 12 because that's what's baked into it, but it's baked into it.

Jason Snell [00:21:49]:
We don't, we still don't think of computers as having chips that have all of this stuff baked into it, but these, these chips have that baked in. That's just how they are. They are made.

Leo Laporte [00:21:59]:
Is that enough?

Jason Snell [00:22:00]:
8 gigs? I, okay. I mean, This is the question about this laptop is, is it enough? I would say yes. And I would say yes for a couple of reasons.

Leo Laporte [00:22:10]:
One is you were running Logic on it.

Jason Snell [00:22:12]:
It was only a couple of years ago where the base model Macs came with 8 gigs and we all complained.

Christina Warren [00:22:17]:
It was not good enough then though. It wasn't.

Jason Snell [00:22:20]:
And this is the thing. It's good enough for who? And what I would say is Apple's, macOS's swap is good. Its multitasking is good. Apple made a point. I think this says something about what they're worried about of having their demo machines and their demos have lots of apps open at once, and then they would like swipe and expose between them and stuff to say, see, see, it can work. And it can work. Is it slower, or are there apps that take huge amounts of RAM that are gonna just fail on this thing? Yeah, but again, it's a $600 computer, and those are probably not the things that you should be doing on here. But it is very functional for— what I kept saying in my review is Computery stuff.

Jason Snell [00:23:02]:
Computery stuff. Like I'm using email. I'm writing things in a text editor. I'm browsing. I'm doing all that stuff. And this is the point that I wanted to make, because I think beyond the price tag, the most important thing about this product is that it's a Mac. It's not a baby Mac. It's not a broken Mac.

Jason Snell [00:23:18]:
It's not a half Mac. It's not a Mac that doesn't do a bunch of things that Macs do. It's just a Mac. I can run Logic on it because I, I edited podcasts in Logic on chips way less powerful than the A18 Pro and it did fine. So, but I'm not making music. I'm not doing that kind of stuff. I'm doing a little podcast editing. But, and it takes me back a little bit to the old days because really back in the old days, it was very much like the cheaper computers were just slower.

Jason Snell [00:23:46]:
It's not like they didn't do stuff. It's just they did it slower. And that's what this is. The storage is slower. It's going to have to swap. It is. It's quite a bit slower even than an Air.

Christina Warren [00:23:56]:
So slow. It's like, it's like the slowest storage I think they've shipped in.

Jason Snell [00:23:59]:
Silicon, or from the benchmark, an Apple Silicon Mac.

Leo Laporte [00:24:03]:
What is it? Is it, is it an SSD?

Jason Snell [00:24:05]:
But again, it's again, for the use profile, I'm not sure that it matters because you can do anything with it, which I do think is an important point that Apple was concerned about is people are going to think this was like not really a Mac. It was like a Chromebook, or it was like, I saw one person speculate that they thought that maybe it would only run apps from the App Store. So no, it's a Mac. You can do homebrew on it. You can, you can run Xcode on it. Don't do that, but you could. And you can run Logic on it or Final Cut. Don't do that, but you could.

Jason Snell [00:24:34]:
And it would just, you know, you would do what all of us who had the 11-inch MacBook Air had to deal with in the 2010s, which is like, oh, oh, it's not that fast, but you, you deal with it. So it is a Mac. It just has all of these limits.

Leo Laporte [00:24:48]:
Well, and looking at benchmarks, it runs actually pretty well. Runs like a an M1 MacBook Air better in some single-core?

Jason Snell [00:24:56]:
It's an M1 when it comes to GPU or multi-threaded. If you're just writing kind of max performance on a single core, it's more like an M3, between M3 and M4, because it's a more modern core. It's like an M— it's because it essentially uses the M4 core.

Leo Laporte [00:25:10]:
It's faster than my M2 MacBook Air that I'm using right now.

Jason Snell [00:25:14]:
So yeah, at that. And that's, I think, from Apple's perspective, The people who are using this computer are probably, you know, that's going to give you enough of a lift that it's not going to feel unreasonable. And I used it. I mean, I literally used this computer all weekend and, um, I wrote my review on it and I wrote, I wrote a bunch of other stuff on it. And again, writing, web browser, uh, did a little bit of podcast editing in Logic just to see. And like, it works. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:25:43]:
Perfect for Christina's thin client.

Jason Snell [00:25:45]:
If you push it hard, you will know that it's a $600 laptop. There's no doubt about it.

Christina Warren [00:25:50]:
I think my only concern, because, because I think you make great points and I think that I don't like the 8GB. I know why it's there. I realize that that's a technical limitation of the chip that they chose and decisions that a completely different team at Apple made for a phone. When they chose that phone chip and made those decisions, they didn't know it was going to go in a laptop. If they had, they might have made different decisions. Well, maybe they did. I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:26:12]:
They might have known.

Leo Laporte [00:26:14]:
Remember, Apple used to say 8GB Gigs is on them, which is a lot of silicon, which is a lie.

Christina Warren [00:26:20]:
It was a lie then. It's a lie now. It's a lie. Well, the reason I said they might not have known is because my experience talking to people over the years at Apple has been that the different divisions don't often talk to one another. So they might have known that that was the case.

Jason Snell [00:26:32]:
But I've had people in the chip group say that when they design the chip, they know exactly every computer it's going to go in. Okay. Did that happen here or was this a little more of a late entry? I don't know. I— because it's got 2 USB ports and literally no iPhone has ever had 2 USB ports. There is one school of thought and I don't I don't know if this is true or not, that that might have actually been put in there in the A16 Pro so they could do two ports. Maybe that's what they might have done it. But, but I get your point. I get your point, Christina, which is it is at least at some point they're basically like, well, if we're going to do this product, we're going to have to use the Bionic chip from the previous year's iPhone.

Jason Snell [00:27:07]:
Do you think—

Christina Warren [00:27:08]:
and that meant that if they launched it this year, it was going to have A16? I guess my question though is, or I guess my comment more is— it's a question and a comment— is I can take these trade-offs. I can understand that 8GB is what we are stuck with, even if I personally don't think it's enough. Um, and people who say that it is, I, I, I, I think that it can be fine, but I don't think it's enough when you look at, is this going to be a laptop that you can use for 5 years? Because that's the problem. Yeah, the MacBook, the M1 MacBook Air that came out almost 6 years ago, that was a machine that if you bought the base variant, even the 128GB version, which, you know, they sold for some of the education things, you could still use very well today. And in some ways, it will be better than the product that this is replacing in the Walmart lineup. I'm just going to be honest, I do not think that this product has to exist, and I'm not saying it has to be, but I do not think that if you spend $500 or $600 on this laptop, that this is going to be a laptop that you will be able to use in 5 years. And that, to me, I think is something that we should at least recognize because that we are— it might be good enough to do these things now. I, you know, RAM shortage is going to continue, but, but, you know, processor requirements, web browsers, all kinds of other things are not going to continue to slow down.

Leo Laporte [00:28:24]:
And I just don't want to—

Christina Warren [00:28:27]:
exactly, I don't want people to be in a position where they're like, 2 years from now they can't use this laptop, you know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:28:32]:
I, I'm to— I'm to— that was one of my biggest, biggest notes too. I couldn't agree with you more that, uh, it's because— and particularly thinking about We're kind of like in sort of an easy mode right now because Apple is not going to be able to ship like locally running LLMs for the next couple of years. But at some point within the lifespan of this machine, I'm wondering 3 years from now if there's going to be OS 28, 29, whatever that is like, oh God, yes, it'll be like running like Prologix. Like, okay, you can use these, fundamental OS features on if you have a 3-year-old Neo, but you definitely wouldn't want to. It's, it's an, it's an interesting schism that we're facing right now because this is, this is a situation in the, in the MacBook lineup that I don't think we've had since that, uh, since that old, that, uh, 10-inch MacBook that we talked about a moment ago where the, the, the cheapest base model entry-level MacBook is now not is now underpowered enough that a lot of people might buy it and think, wow, why is this so dog slow? Why did I buy this? Whereas before you would buy— again, even if you walked out of Walmart with a $700 M1 MacBook, MacBook Air, it would be fine for almost anything you did and would be good enough at even like Lightroom and Photoshop that it would give us— you know what, I think my next, my next MacBook is going to be like a MacBook Book Pro because I can— I, I'm really loving what I'm doing with Photoshop, but I want to be able to do it better. But this is the one where— this is one where we, we need to explain to everybody that Apple has a nox— no, no talkback, no excuses, 2-week return policy that you really need. I think you really need to beat the hell out of this for the first couple weeks to make sure there isn't that one edge case when you're not just pushing the cursor to the right where, oh my God, this is going to be— this is a thing I do every 9 days, but every 9 days this is going to be a terrible experience.

Jason Snell [00:30:24]:
I don't disagree. That people should be sure that this is a computer they can use for whatever they want to use it for. But I will say it is a superior computer to the M1 MacBook Air in almost every way. So it's not going to be a degraded experience out the door than that computer that was at Walmart. It is, if anything, faster than the M1 MacBook Air. That said, at the time, contemporary, the MacBook Air is 5+ years old, the M1 MacBook Air, and this is brand new. And that goes to Christina's point. I do wonder, one of the things when Apple introduced private cloud compute that I thought is, oh, I see what you're doing.

Jason Snell [00:31:02]:
Eventually you'll have a bunch of models that run on device, and if the computer is too old, they will run in private cloud compute instead. And they could do stuff like that. But I, I think that's a fair point that we can say the M1, the M1 Air is still great. M1 systems are still amazing, especially for this level of use case. The problem is that they are old. And is the M1 so great that 10 years out, M1 level performance is still acceptable?

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:29]:
And I'm No, no, no, no one's saying the M1 should be the, should be the table stakes. I'm just, I'm just saying that I'm saying within the context, like historically speaking, and historically involves like the first couple of years up to maybe even last year. Again, if you walked into an Apple store with what is the cheapest MacBook I can buy, you would walk out with something that is roughly, that is a very, very competent and almost any task you would throw at it machine. Whereas now if you walk into an Apple store and walk out with the cheapest Mac, you are buying one that is, if you are, unless you are the most careless consumer ever, you're buying something that you know is compromised for a lot of tasks, but nonetheless suitable for the tasks that you chose to put into it, where the $500 you saved off of the M5 MacBook Air is more valuable to you than the extra performance you would get, the extra displays, the extra, the faster storage, the faster RAM, all that sort of stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
Is the price low enough?

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:24]:
Yeah, hell yeah.

Christina Warren [00:32:25]:
Yeah, I think for the base model it is. Um, I will say this, I said this on, um, on Mastodon and Twitter and Blue Sky earlier today. I think that, and this obviously can change and, and it gets a little bit iffier with student discounts, I think the $700 unit that they're selling, um, you know, that price you can, but right now, and I know this won't always be the same, you can buy a refurb M4 Air for $760. Oh, that is, that is a better machine every single— there's no comparison. There's no comparison. Do not buy the $700 model. There is zero reason to buy that. I think, though, that the $600 or $500, if you use the student discount, I think that's low enough.

Christina Warren [00:33:03]:
I mean, we were all last week, we were surprised that they were able to come in this low. Now we see the compromises they had to make. And so I think that's how we get there, right? And we can hope that future versions might make less compromises like they've done. On the 17E, for instance, this year versus, you know, the one last year. And I know that Apple takes this sort of feedback to heart. And as things push on, we can hope that this will continue to get better. I do think $500 for the compromises that are there, I do think that's low enough. But that said, I would not— or $500 or $600, I would not spend $700.

Christina Warren [00:33:34]:
I would not, like, especially if you can get a refurb of the proper Air for almost nothing more. More, you know, like that one. I don't, I don't think I would upgrade it, but, but I think that the base model, I think, is okay.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:47]:
But here's a, here's a counter that I've been thinking about. How about a year from now when you maybe can buy a factory refurb Neo for $400, or let's say $450, maybe a little bit more realistic, but for substantially under $500 without an educational discount?

Christina Warren [00:34:07]:
That, that, okay, that, that is actually compelling. And I think at that point that becomes a different conversation. That, that's a great point. I still would stand by, I would not buy like the stepped up, like the one with Touch ID and 512. As much as I love Touch ID, as much as I, I know why they left that off, you can use an Apple Watch. There are other ways you can kind of, you know, get around that. I just, I personally, if I was going to invest $100 into it, I would look at, okay, is there another option where I could get a better overall laptop, you know, for that money? Um, save the $100 for something else. Um, but for $450, Again, I still worry it will be usable 3 years after that, and I don't know.

Christina Warren [00:34:43]:
And I think that's a valid thing. And I think for some of us, we might look at $450 and go, you know what, that's fine. We can, you know, amortize that just based on it being around good enough. I think though that if you're buying this— this I think is the one disconnect that Apple has a little bit with this product. This is going after a new audience, and Jason pointed that out, which I think is a great point. These are people who have not been Mac users before. However, the general consensus, with the exception of the M-series Intel chips, like so the 12-inch MacBook and the Retina MacBook Air, the, the general kind of consensus I think on, on MacBooks, and honestly the whole kind of, you know, mid-2010s era Macs were kind of a mess, was that you can have them for, for a decade and they will hold their value and you can use them for a long time. That's kind of been the conventional wisdom, and that's why you see people sell really old Intel Macs for way more than they should ever be able to sell them for on eBay.

Christina Warren [00:35:34]:
And people buy it because they don't know any better. And they don't realize, no, you are buying something that should be $50 at most. Do not spend $300 on this thing. Right, right. But people look at Macs, they're like, oh, they last forever. They really hold their value. I think at least with this one, and future ones might be different, we are going to get to that point where I'm going to be like, is this going to be— one that you could use meaningfully a couple of years from now, and that I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:59]:
Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think also a lot of this is, uh, whether Apple— how long does Apple want to support this? Because, uh, because I have, I have two, I have three laptops in regular rotation. Number one priority is my MacBook Pro. Number two priority is my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard. But third priority is actually a 2016 like Intel Chromebook that I've got Linux running on. And the weird thing is that I kind of, again, when my task for the day or for the afternoon is to just push the cursor to the right, meaning writing stuff in Markdown, email messages, doing some research on the web, I'm shocked at how performant this 2016 laptop that was designed to be a cheap cheap, even a 2016 laptop still is. So I'm trying to— I absolutely 100% agree with you. Let's make sure that's really, really clear.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:57]:
I'm trying to— over the past week, I've been trying to expand my imagination as to encompass the sort of users that are just the ideal market for a $400 Chromebook. They aren't buying it because they're being forced to use or anything like that. They are literally, again, they're buying it as, let's say, a phone accessory., as opposed to like a productivity machine, like how little is going to be more than enough for those people. And I'm trying to give myself the imagination to imagine that this level of performance, even 5 years from now, even with whatever disadvantages that it acquires as macOS becomes more and more sophisticated and AI becomes more and more integrated into the experience, into users' expectations, will that still be enough? And the question has to be, Maybe yes.

Jason Snell [00:37:44]:
So it's hard. I will, I will say I think Apple knows what it's doing in releasing this product with these configurations at this time. Like, Apple, Apple knows it has to support this thing, right? It has to know, it has to look at its roadmap and now be aware that, you know, it used to have an M— a bunch of M1s from 2020 and 2021 that it had to support for some period of time. And we don't know yet bit sort of what the, the overall sort of software support is going to be in the Apple Silicon era. We're about to shed the Intel era. The next question is, at what point does Apple say M1 doesn't really get this feature or whatever, right? By doing this, they are resetting the clock. They are saying, okay, 2026 and 2027, at least for a little bit, we're going to sell an A18 Pro laptop. And they have to know that that means they have to support it and they have to think about compatibility.

Jason Snell [00:38:39]:
When they do OS features. All of that is now on with 8 gigs of RAM, right? They, all of that is on the table. So I, I do think they would not release this product not having a game plan for that, but, but you are still putting yourself in there. I mean, we always do that with any product we buy from any company, right? You, you, there is some level of hope that they're going to behave well. Apple has a good track record here. So I would like to think that the track record of supporting this thing will be decent, but again, At $599, I think it's important for all of us who spend several hours, uh, on or listening to a tech podcast, uh, the, the audience for this, the target audience for this is using their computer in a very different way with very, like, I saw a lot of people complaining about like no Thunderbolt. It's like, I, I barely use Thunderbolt. Like it, this is a very different kind of system.

Jason Snell [00:39:33]:
I'm not saying that it isn't important for it to be good. But I can tell you it has all the good things that a Mac has. And the hope is that it will continue to do what the buyers of this product need it to do for a decent amount of time. I agree. This is, this is a bigger question mark than Apple has had in a Mac since Apple Silicon started. Right. So that's the, that's the real question to me is like, how is it going to go? But I do. I think the most important point is there's a whole collection of people out there who are not dumb people.

Jason Snell [00:40:09]:
They're just, they just don't care about computers like we do, right? They just don't care, but you need a laptop for something or other. You need to have one. And they, I'll say what the mindset is. A lot of times the mindset is, well, I can buy a MacBook Air for $1,000, but this HP laptop is $500. Why would I spend an extra $500 for a computer? They're not thinking about total cost of ownership and how macOS is nicer. And, and, and they're not dumb. They just don't care. They don't see why they are, right? They don't see why it should matter.

Jason Snell [00:40:41]:
But now that there is a, now that there's a $600 Mac, they're like, oh, I do. Because keep in mind, way more people have iPhones than Macs, right? Like, there's just the raw numbers. Way more people have iPhones than have Macs. So there are a lot of people out there who like Apple. They like their iPhone and they've never considered an Apple computer because it's like, why would I pay more? More, when they see this, they will consider it. That's kind of who this is for. And that's why Apple is targeting switchers again with this campaign. And, you know, and I think it's, that's why we're all, I think, excited about Apple playing this area because it's a potential for people who've never really considered the Mac before to consider it.

Jason Snell [00:41:16]:
And what they'll get is a Mac. It is not the best Mac, but it is also not a broken Mac. It is, it clears the bar for now. I think Christina's point is how long does it clear the bar?

Leo Laporte [00:41:27]:
Last question, is this going to replace the MacBook Air as the best-selling Mac?

Jason Snell [00:41:30]:
I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think this is— I think, I think it'll, I think it'll cannibalize a little from the Air. I think it'll cannibalize a bit from people trying to make it work with an iPad and a keyboard.

Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
And I think it might hurt the iPad.

Jason Snell [00:41:44]:
I think they're good.

Leo Laporte [00:41:46]:
Yeah, actually, it's really an iPad, isn't it?

Jason Snell [00:41:47]:
And I think their goal is to create new users.

Christina Warren [00:41:50]:
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. At first I was like, oh yeah, totally will. And then, no, I think you're right, Jason. Like, the best selling iPhone is iPhone Pro. The best-selling, you know, uh, Mac is the MacBook Air. And at this point, I think the MacBook Air— even Apple is kind of conceding in a lot of ways— is really— that is the, the great kind of all-around perfect laptop, right? You can get up with 32 gigs of RAM with the latest version, right? And, and it— which is crazy, right? Like, it is— it's a very powerful machine. And in a lot of cases, I mean, like, a lot of companies I know that used to issue standard issue, like, MacBook MacBook Pros to their engineers are issuing, uh, very high-level but still MacBook Airs as standard-issue computers now. And it's not because they're spending less money like that.

Christina Warren [00:42:30]:
That's— it's not about that. It's because the MacBook Air does what they want, and then it's, it's lighter and it's, and it's thinner, and, and, you know, it's got great battery life. So people are much happier with that than having like a 16-inch MacBook Pro. Um, that's— I mean, I guess we'll just have to see because like on the one hand, so I think that probably is the case. I don't think this is going to make a meaningful dent in education, no matter what anyone says. They're too ingrained with Chrome. No. The way Google does the device management, you would have to pay for Jamf, which is just an extra fee.

Christina Warren [00:43:01]:
You're already using Google for your courseware. You're already using them for your Google Workspace. So you're going to still have to pay Google anyway. And you're going to— I don't care what the long-term ownership costs are. You're doubling your costs versus what you would pay paying for Chromebooks on Macs.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:15]:
Can I add one, one thing too? What a lot of the commentary is overlooking is the fact that, take a look at a Chromebook. Take a look at a laptop that Dell, HP, Asus makes specifically for the education market. It is, there are no tricky screws, there are no adhesives. You can swap out a battery without having to soften any glues. You can swap out a screen. It is built to be as durable as those phones from episodes of Columbo in the 1970s that could be used as a murder weapon because kids are are animals and they will, they will find ways to break things. And when you put, when you put the, when you put, um, again, Neo is beautiful, it's wonderful, it's lovely, but it will not last in an education environment. That's one of the biggest for the, and the, the reasons you stated are just as actually probably more important because Google has done such an amazing job.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:06]:
Not does Apple, when Apple made a push towards every student having a computer, buying an iPad, they started off with, well, we're going build this wonderful, wonderful iPad. We're, we're in a market and package this iPad. Google started off with teachers like, how— what are your technical requirements? And include— that would include administration. How are you going to maintain and make sure you have courseware for us? So it's an entire package. But again, it's, it's not going to make a dent against education unless you're talking about the education meaning that kids are going to want to— are going to, are going to want to buy, yeah, they're going to want to buy their own notebook.

Jason Snell [00:44:39]:
And there are sites that have more money and experiment and, you know, but those are going to probably be the exception and not the rule. Christina and I had had a little back and forth on this. And I pointed out that the original rumor about this, which was more than 2 years ago in Digitimes, cast the whole thing as a Chromebook killer. And at the time I wrote a blog post about it and I said, you know, that's not what this is. This is using an iPhone chip in a Mac because you could do that now when it would be a decent Mac. And it took more than 2 years for that rumor report to the product coming out. But like a Chromebook killer always seemed bizarre. Now the, the mid, the mid $500-ish PC laptop, that is in trouble.

Jason Snell [00:45:20]:
And I know that Apple, um, Apple picks what it picks, but like they made a point of carting out a $550 HP 14-inch laptop and sitting it next to the Neo. And I know that they picked it and there were probably better ones they could have perfect, but I will just say it was garbage. It felt flimsy. The screen was terrible. Apple has the advantage here of having the really nice aluminum enclosure and the screen is bright. It's not as good as a MacBook Air screen, but you know what? It's a good screen and it's going to, that's, that's much more likely where this is going to impact people is people who are like, I'm going to spend $500 on a laptop.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:55]:
No, I agree. Especially as all these Windows 10 notebooks are now end of life and they're going to have to replace them. Replace them anyway. Um, I think— I don't think— I don't think that the $500 Windows notebook is dead. I think that they—

Jason Snell [00:46:07]:
they're good.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:08]:
No killer is a killer. And in an environment in which their notebook sales industry-wide are already down 12% with no up— uprange in sight, it's a huge, huge problem.

Jason Snell [00:46:19]:
That—

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:19]:
with the advantages that the Windows line still has is that, uh, they have— they have tendrils into every single retail channel where anybody could conceivably be looking for a laptop. Some people Again, they just want to get— they just want to solve the problem of, I need a notebook. Okay, that's fine. Costco, great. Sounds great. Let's get it. And the third thing is that this is Costco too, though. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:41]:
But I'm saying, but they might recognize something in a Windows notebook they don't recognize in Apple. But the, but, and, but the other thing is that, and this is not even an advantage of Windows, the thing is what's great about— I'm about to say, here's why, here's, here's an, here's something that Windows has going going for it.

Leo Laporte [00:46:58]:
Even though, even though, even though—

Jason Snell [00:46:59]:
Burn the heretic!

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:01]:
Even though— oh, please, I've been burned so many times in 20 years from so many people. Um, what, what I was about to get at though is that the great, the great, the great advantage of the Neo that hasn't been spoken of is that you walk in, you spend $600, and you get the great $600 notebook. Whereas on Windows side, you can walk in and walk out with a great $600 notebook that as pretty much as well made as a Neo, I think at least as good in spec, given that this might be a year old instead of current, maybe even with more features, more storage, more ports, more stuff like that. The problem is you gotta fight for it. You have to comparison shop like hell. And also like, also you have to be aware of the fact that Dell makes an XPS laptop that is list price at $900, but it's a fake price because 8 times a year it drops down to like $640. So it's, it's so hard to make an apples-to-apples compare here. But again, that, but that's why I choose to, in this context, to say that this is another hidden advantage of the Neo.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:05]:
You walk in with this at $600, you walk out with the modern, extremely well-built, extremely well-supported $600 notebook. You don't have to set up 18 NORAD-style windows to track. And also this stuff, I was trying to, I was trying to to create a good one-to-one compare. It took me like all afternoon before I realized that the message was that it's impossible to compare because like, okay, well, here's again another HP, but oh damn it. That's right. It's there. It's called the, the, the, the, the, the Dell RackMento 12 2026XXA. But you have to realize that the SKU is like, there's a separate SKU for every single retailer and they all have different specs.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:45]:
You can't do one-to-ones. This is madness. This is why, this is why almost everybody's going to say, dad, mom, or uncle, whatever, go to the Apple Store, give them $600. They will give you a laptop that is perfectly fine. You don't have to worry about it.

Christina Warren [00:49:00]:
No, I mean, I think you're great. I think the only advantage that you have in the Windows world at all is that you get more configurations, meaning if you wanted a bigger screen or something, uh, which some people might be swayed by. But no, I mean, you're gonna get for, for $600 and, and by By killer, I don't mean that this is going to kill the segment. Sure. What I mean is for $600, you're not going to find a better $600, which is exactly what you're saying.

Jason Snell [00:49:22]:
100%.

Christina Warren [00:49:22]:
On the market.

Leo Laporte [00:49:23]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:49:23]:
In a place that Apple was never even considered before. Exactly. My dad won't use a Mac, unfortunately. I had to buy him a Windows laptop a couple of years ago, and I had to— he'd used a Chromebook and that was okay, but that had some issues with his printer and scanning, and maybe that's been fixed by now, but at the time time, you know, I got my mom on a Mac 15, 16 years ago, but I can't get my dad on one. So I had to go through Andy's exact thing. I had to do the NORAD screens. I had to do the research on Slickdeals. I had to find what's the best one I can do within the requirements he wants.

Christina Warren [00:49:54]:
It took me far longer than it should have. If we were to do it today, and in fact, actually, this might happen if/when his laptop dies, and it's only a couple of years old, but it's a Windows laptop. And it's one of those things, I upgraded the RAM on it, but whatever, I'm probably just going to buy him the Neo and say, this is what you use now. You don't have a choice.

Leo Laporte [00:50:15]:
If you want me to support it, this is what you're going to buy. Right. All right, so you've blown my entire budget for all of the announcements. We've managed to spend an entire hour on the Neo alone.

Jason Snell [00:50:27]:
It's the new one. It's exciting. It is the big one, and it is new. By the way, I have a little tangent because we were talking about will it replace the MacBook Air, and is the MacBook Air so mainstream now that, that, uh, you might not even get a MacBook Pro and it becomes more of a very, you know, high-end, you know it if you need it kind of system. I will say that every time people ask, like, could you run Logic or Final Cut on the Neo, Apple PR people would say, well, you can, but if you're doing those kinds of workflows, we recommend you consider the MacBook Air. And sometimes that's all they would say. Other times they would— there would be a long pause and they would Or the MacBook Pro. MacBook Pro also great.

Jason Snell [00:51:02]:
And I thought that was really telling. Like, I know you're coming up from the Neo to the Air. It's the first one you see as you're passing through. Okay, I get it. But I think there's also truth in that. Like, MacBook Air is super— that's why we're here, right? Is that Apple Silicon has thrown the performance of all of these Mac laptops up so high that there's room for another one underneath the MacBook Air now that wasn't there before. And the MacBook Air is, is So even Apple is like, oh, right, the MacBook Pro too, because the MacBook Air was the first thing they went to.

Andy Ihnatko [00:51:31]:
The Air is still a hell of a default. I mean, I will probably be finally replacing my— I'll probably be replacing my M1 MacBook Pro finally this year. And it's going to take me months just to figure out, should I save money? Should I spend the same amount of money on a MacBook Air that's a little bit more maxed out? Or should I— do I still need to do my usual play, which is buy essentially the base level MacBook Pro? Because it has— like, Christina had a great, great discussion last week about how cooling is such a big effect on—

Jason Snell [00:51:58]:
because I was a fan.

Andy Ihnatko [00:51:59]:
Yeah, yeah, that's why years ago I bought the MacBook Pro instead of the, the M1 MacBook Air. It's like, okay, I really want that fan because I really think that's going to pay off in the end. But yeah, it's, it's hard, it's hard to know what the difference is even if you're one of those people who uses a MacBook as a desktop as well. It became a much more difficult decision. I'm glad I could so easily reject the Neo. Because that's the only easy part of this decision tree.

Leo Laporte [00:52:24]:
We're going to take a break. When we come back, somebody at Apple marketing has been microdosing, I think. I don't know. We'll see. We'll find out. Watching too much anime. Songs going on. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with the wonderful Christina Warren, now a regular member of our panel.

Leo Laporte [00:52:43]:
So glad to have you. And Christina has a couple of rants, I think, coming up. We'll talk about Ticketmaster and Tahoe. Together at last. Uh, Andy and Ako also here, not from the library, from his very own home. Listen for the occasional Harley going by. And the man with the lemon tree, even though he can't see the lemon.

Christina Warren [00:53:04]:
Mr.—

Jason Snell [00:53:04]:
I can see the lemon just fine. Yellow. I can see yellow.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:06]:
That is a pitch for a really interesting children's book. The man with a lemon tree who could not see the light.

Jason Snell [00:53:11]:
It's a— yes, no, I can see, I can see everything except very, very light pinks and very, very, um, differences in shades of pink. I'm okay. Yeah, it's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:53:22]:
You're fine. All right, our show today brought to you by Pebl. Not the Pebble you're thinking of. P-E-B-L. In fact, it's at hipebl.ai. H-I-P-E-B-L dot A-I. Here's a quick question. If you're hiring, are you hiring in another country right now? Uh, a lot of people are.

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Leo Laporte [00:55:30]:
Go to hipebl.ai to get a free estimate. Again, hipebl.ai for a free estimate. hipebl.ai. We thank them so much for thinking of us and supporting MacBreak Weekly. Okay, 17-inch, skip that. MacBook Pros, skip that. New displays, unless anybody has something they want to say. Okay, skip that.

Leo Laporte [00:55:56]:
Uh, now let's get to the most important thing: Apple's new TikTok ads. What a weird collection of, um, stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:06]:
Have you seen them? Yeah, it's— yeah, most— mostly, mostly I'm aware of them because I'm aware of all the social media stuff in my feed. Say, what the hell is Apple—

Jason Snell [00:56:17]:
what the hell?

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:19]:
I love them. It's the Finder. No, again, I think it's cool. But I'm surprised they didn't come up right at the gate and said, so get ahead of it. They're calling, they're calling this little cat, this little animated character that's like all bubbling and doing TikTok stuff. Uh, he's adorable. He reminds me of like the Android droid, which is, it's nice to have a personification to like for your marketing and for your messaging.

Leo Laporte [00:56:38]:
I do think that's not just that. I mean, look at this, a guy in blue jeans turns around. All he's showing is a Neo in his pocket. Here's blue denim dye hands. There's no computer in it. This is one of my favorites. I love that. This is a great one.

Leo Laporte [00:56:52]:
This is a throwback. It says Macintosh. Yeah, insanely great. And then it says, hello, I am Macintosh. Like, okay, it doesn't— this is like the product, 30, 40-year-old product.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:06]:
I don't know if they're aware of history now.

Christina Warren [00:57:10]:
It's retro. I mean, look, the kids all use the wired headphones now, right?

Leo Laporte [00:57:13]:
Like, genuinely. Did this speak to you, a little bit of blush in a MacBook Neo?

Christina Warren [00:57:19]:
I mean, I do, I mean, look, I do, I do, I do love, like, I guess for the new color cases that look— that, that blush case is—

Leo Laporte [00:57:26]:
I would buy that.

Jason Snell [00:57:27]:
They should make this.

Christina Warren [00:57:28]:
I know they did genuinely. They would sell out instantly.

Leo Laporte [00:57:32]:
Sold out.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:33]:
I mean, classic iBook.

Jason Snell [00:57:34]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christina Warren [00:57:35]:
Like that, that I would— if Apple did a makeup collab, they never would. But if they—

Leo Laporte [00:57:39]:
well, although, no, you know what, is this— it's just the sunrise. I don't even Oh, it's the sound. Wait a minute. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. This was one that I saw around. Just all the sounds together with fizzy lemons and limes.

Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:57:57]:
It's great. I like the one where the lime FaceTimes.

Leo Laporte [00:58:00]:
Oh, you want to see the lime FaceTiming? That's my favorite one. Let me see if I can find that one. There's quite a few of them. Oh, this is—

Jason Snell [00:58:07]:
I think this is it. Is this it? Yeah, that's it. A lime with space timing.

Christina Warren [00:58:14]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:58:14]:
Hello, this is lime.

Leo Laporte [00:58:17]:
And then the lime's talking to the lemon.

Jason Snell [00:58:21]:
That's it. That's the whole thing. That's it. That's the joke. That's the whole thing.

Leo Laporte [00:58:24]:
They're all really short, which is very interesting.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:29]:
I'm just surprised they didn't name the character. People are calling the character like the Finder Guy.

Christina Warren [00:58:32]:
I love them so much and I like to present them like they're this in my house.

Jason Snell [00:58:36]:
Wait a minute, let me play that again.

Christina Warren [00:58:38]:
Sorry, I love them. They're great. I love them so much, and I like to present them like this in my house.

Leo Laporte [00:58:42]:
If you say this, it just is non-sequitur, but it's great.

Christina Warren [00:58:45]:
Well, the reason the audio clip was that, that was Hilaria Baldwin.

Leo Laporte [00:58:50]:
Uh, and I've seen that.

Jason Snell [00:58:51]:
Yes.

Christina Warren [00:58:51]:
So, so they're like playing off of a thing. This is all aesthetic. I mean, look, this is, uh, not to say anything about our beloved audience, these ads, um, are probably not for us, unfortunately.

Leo Laporte [00:59:02]:
Um, but I, they're for the young.

Christina Warren [00:59:04]:
They're for Gen Alpha or whatever they call it. I mean, they finally hired some Gen Z marketing people, I think, or let's actually be clear, they hired a Gen Z marketing agency. And I think they're doing a pretty good job. I mean, we would have to see the results, but I mean, it matches a lot of the other stuff I see from other more popular brands, like in that kind of demographic.

Leo Laporte [00:59:25]:
Is it? Oh, so this is not, so this is a good one. This is a birth announcement. Be born today, 11:00 AM. Today's your big day. And then they have kind of a gender reveal.

Jason Snell [00:59:36]:
I'm not sure exactly what's going on here. Well, it's like an actual message thing. Oh yeah, and there's like candles and it's like emoji and iMessage effects and stuff. It's very cute.

Leo Laporte [00:59:47]:
If you're just listening, even the audio is great on these, but if you're just listening, you're missing some of the— It's the Apple account on TikTok.

Christina Warren [00:59:55]:
Well, what's smart about how they did that particular video that we just watched was that they showed it in— it was framed so it could look like it's an iPhone. And you're seeing your iMessage— iPhone— iMessage notifications come in. Then they scroll out and you see it's a Mac. I think that's important because this is going after— again, this is all going to people who have not been Mac users. There are way more iPhone users than Mac users. And I noticed this in the marketing on their own home page and some of their videos, like the ads that they made. They made a really big deal like you can iMessage on your laptop. That is a huge— that's another selling point.

Christina Warren [01:00:30]:
Like, for $500, $600, like, you can't— that's a thing you can't do on a Chromebook. That's a thing you can't do on a Windows laptop, right? Like, because trust me, no one who— yes, I know about Bluebubbles, I'm aware— no one who's, you know, going to be using those things is going to be setting up a Bluebubbles server, which requires a Mac anyway. So, um, like, that's a huge selling point, especially to people who As we know, the teens already have iPhones.

Leo Laporte [01:00:54]:
They like to see your messages on your laptop. By the way, right, week-old account, 7.7 million followers, and the most viewed video, which is that blush video, that little blush video, is 59 million views in a week.

Christina Warren [01:01:09]:
They probably paid for ads, but that's still very, very good.

Jason Snell [01:01:11]:
This is so remarkable. The character they dropped, Andy mentioned they dropped this character in one of these videos that's like a a person with the Mac Finder face. Oh yeah. And people are like calling him the like Finder guy or whatever. I'm just going to put it out there. I don't know. His name's Mac, right? Like it's got to be his name.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:28]:
Has he been named?

Jason Snell [01:01:30]:
Yeah, exactly. I'm just saying, I'm going to put that out in the world that I want to—

Leo Laporte [01:01:35]:
it's Mac. Let me show you. People haven't seen Finder guy. So the Finder head, which is that kind of dual profile front on. Face. Yeah. Where, where is this ad showing? I don't—

Jason Snell [01:01:49]:
oh, is it?

Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
No, that's it.

Jason Snell [01:01:51]:
It's on the TikTok videos.

Leo Laporte [01:01:52]:
Yeah, I must have missed it.

Jason Snell [01:01:53]:
Okay. Yeah. And it's the, it's the, yes, it's two faces that was originally in the macOS logo basically when they had to do macOS licensing during the System 7 era for clones. And then it got repurposed as the Finder icon. And we, we know it does that today and it's a symbol of the Mac. And then there's a little character. With some little two faces on his face. Cute.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:13]:
Can I also say that this, that this symbol, this logo symbol has been like our collective canary on when Apple absolutely loses its sense of fun. We've all been waiting for at what point are we going to update to a new OS and suddenly there's something gray with two dots in the middle of it that represents the Finder.

Jason Snell [01:02:29]:
It's like, okay, that's— no, it'd be just the files icon from iOS. It'll just be an icon of a folder. A folder, which people don't even—

Christina Warren [01:02:37]:
which the kids don't even know what folders are. So Which is actually interestingly, I think that might be more of an issue for Apple with this newer generation of users who are used to Chromebooks and iPhones, ironically, more than anything else from the operating system point of view would be like, oh, we now have to explain basic file management paradigms because you don't know that things are just always saved to a cloud. But yeah, I hope they won't. But it would be great if they would do a collab with some collectible company. It would be higher end and sell the Little Mac guy because I would totally buy that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:14]:
I don't, you know, I don't think it's wrong that the part of the Google Store is, hey, you want like a resin version of the dinosaur? I know, great. Do you want— hey, do you know what, we created like new, new vinyl droids for like the Olympics this year. Yeah, like, again, we, we're, we're a weird species. We like that kind of stuff.

Jason Snell [01:03:31]:
I like— I know, Chris, I like it.

Christina Warren [01:03:31]:
It does. When I worked at Google, that was like literally one of the things I did when I went to like the big company store.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:36]:
Oh my, yes, look what I still have on my desk. It's like, I kind of— I like these things.

Christina Warren [01:03:40]:
Oh my gosh, I have those. I, I don't know where they are, but I have those things.

Leo Laporte [01:03:43]:
Those are the Gumby, the Gumby iPod and the Gumby Mac.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:46]:
Mac.

Christina Warren [01:03:46]:
I bought both of those. I have no idea where they are, but I, I bought them both. The iPod's my favorite.

Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
Yes. Yeah. So not only did they get a Gen Z or maybe a Gen Alpha marketing team, they've actually reorged the, um, the design, the executive leadership page Alan Dye, of course, has left, uh, so they are now bringing two more designers up into the executive page, uh, right next to Tim Cook and John Ternus.

Jason Snell [01:04:18]:
Molly Anderson— well, they're below the line.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:21]:
Okay, they're not senior vice president.

Leo Laporte [01:04:22]:
They're not at the top.

Jason Snell [01:04:24]:
Okay, they're on the page. I just— I'm tickled by the fact that there's a horizontal rule between the senior vice president and the vice presidents, just so you know whose fault it is.

Leo Laporte [01:04:33]:
Steve Lemay also, he's taking over for Allan Dye. So this is Parker Adelani's blog who says the new Apple begins to emerge. Is that fair?

Jason Snell [01:04:43]:
Is that— Well, who was standing on stage in New York at the Experience introducing the video? It was John Ternus. Who has made all the press tour for this? It's John Ternus. I mean, it is new hardware and he's the SVP of hardware.. But I think it's hard not to look at it and think this is a calculation to get him more visible and known as part of his— I'm not even saying as a done deal, but like if you're considering him for a CEO role, they did this with both the candidates at Disney too. You, you, you want to expose them to those aspects of the business and run them out there and, and, and see how they do. I mean, quite frankly, and it's either, you know, if he does a bad job, they could be like, maybe not. Or if he does get the job, it won't be quite as much of a who because they'll be like, "Oh yeah, I saw that guy in the last year or whatever." And so yeah, he's very visible.

Leo Laporte [01:05:35]:
I should point out that, yeah, here's the top line. There's that little thin bar separating them, Molly and Steve, from the big shots. John Ternus is the last one on the big shots page. And then at the very bottom is Phil Schiller, who I guess he's— this is on the way out. It's just an Apple Fellow. He's slowly migrating from the top of the page to the bottom.

Jason Snell [01:05:56]:
The thing with Phil is that Phil is still in charge of events and the App Store. So he's not a minister without portfolio. He has a portfolio. It's just he's like retired and become an Apple Fellow and is still also a senior executive all at the same time. It's nice. Maybe he works a little less. I don't know. I don't know.

Jason Snell [01:06:15]:
But he's still very present and was at the event. In New York.

Leo Laporte [01:06:19]:
So yeah, yeah. So that's— were there people reading the tea leaves about John Ternus doing the presentation?

Jason Snell [01:06:24]:
Every time he shows up prominently in anything now, everybody's like, yep. And I don't know if that's right or wrong, and we wouldn't have done that before, but certainly everybody's thinking it now.

Christina Warren [01:06:34]:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting too. I mean, he was even asked about it, um, and he gave like the perfect Apple PR answer, which is he was like, well, I'm very happy with the job that I have, and, and I And I was like, oh, okay, you have had the really, really— you've had the really, really good media training.

Leo Laporte [01:06:47]:
You have had like the—

Jason Snell [01:06:51]:
we've heard that, which is why he's above the line.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:51]:
We're going to play one game at a time. And the good Lord willing, things will work out.

Christina Warren [01:06:55]:
No, but I think you're spot on. I mean, this is exactly what they did with Josh D'Amelio and with Dana Walden at Disney. This is what a lot of companies do. I think this is one of the things they didn't do with Bob Chapek, which is— I think if they had, you know, Bob Iger might have realized at Disney the first time, this guy is not our guy. I think the real thing there was Bob Iger just didn't want to leave and felt forced to. But in this case, I mean, yeah, I think that he seems to have a lot of credibility. For all the complaints that people have about Apple, it's not the hardware. So I think that if you're going to, you know, look at a successor, the hardware guy is not the one who's going to be getting a lot of the flak from even the diehards, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
Well, get ready, because according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Now that we have— how many was this, this last week? 5, 6 products. Now that those are out the door, next come the Ultra products. Apple's Ultra products expansion is up next after the MacBook Neo launch. As many as 20 new products this year. Um, so that's kind of dramatic. Uh, he's talking about he thinks Ultra will be the name of the M6 MacBook, that the, I don't know, CarPlay Ultra, Apple Watch Ultra. You don't think Ultra will migrate into the other products?

Jason Snell [01:08:14]:
The iPhone foldable? iPhone? I really like Mark Gurman. He is a great reporter. He has great sources. Bloomberg also requires him to be a pundit, and sometimes it gets complicated about whether he's doing punditizing or whether he knows things. And as you read this article, I, I mean, I read this article at and thought to myself, well, what he's really doing is sort of stitching together. And later in the story, he's like, they may not all be called Ultra, but the trend is that Apple's gonna do more super premium products, which is not wrong.

Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
He knows what's coming. Actually, that's interesting. They're spreading, aren't they? And they've done this before. They did it with the iPods where they spread the market.

Jason Snell [01:08:49]:
They get the low end and now they're moving, now they get the high end. I mean, since, forgive me for repeating myself, but since the iPhone X, what we've discovered is Apple continues to try to find a product too expensive for an Apple product, uh, part of the Apple audience to buy and has not yet found it. There is a portion of the Apple audience that will buy very expensive phones, very expensive laptops. The gold watch was probably the one lesson. Maybe not that, maybe not that, but for a real product, like, because the, because they did the iPhone X and it was like, wow, let's do a, let's do a version of that that's bigger and that's sold too. And they, they have kept kind of creeping up. We're going to get that folding phone. But it goes back to what I was saying about the Air, that Apple Silicon lifted the Air and the Pro to the point where Apple recommends the Air for a lot of stuff now, and then the Neo can come underneath.

Jason Snell [01:09:41]:
And that it does make the Pro maybe more of a specialist— people who really need all those GPU cores and all of that, or the, or the cooling or whatever it is. And it does— I think Mark asked a really good question, which is they do this M6 MacBook Pro with Touch. I think we're all assuming that the M5 MacBook Pro will go away, but he does at least ask the question, is this like a MacBook Ultra? Is this a— I think it's not, but he's asking the question because his larger point, again, I think the Ultra is a thing for him to hang his story on. His point is Apple is also pushing a bunch of stuff up in the high end and doing new versions of a bunch of that stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:10:20]:
And that's what they're doing with that MacBook Pro and there are other sides to that. If they're going to release the MacBook M5 Max and then some sort of M6 in the fall, they've done that multiple times.

Jason Snell [01:10:35]:
They did that 2 years ago, they did that 4 years ago.

Christina Warren [01:10:39]:
Remember the year that they released the iPad 3 and then it was not even 6 months later they released the iPad?

Leo Laporte [01:10:44]:
I do remember that. But this— but people know the M6 is coming. Yeah, but if you need a laptop, depress sales of the M5 Max.

Christina Warren [01:10:53]:
Maybe if you need a lot of—

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
yeah, I'm not going to buy the M5 Max.

Christina Warren [01:10:56]:
For you, sure. But A, we keep pointing out like how many people are as plugged into this stuff, right? So if you just know I need a new MacBook, MacBook Air is probably right. But if you have, say, an M1 and you can get, you know, M1 Max and you're looking to upgrade, um, there's also— I mean, you might want to do it even if you know what's coming out. I mean, I would say this, there's something to be said for, you know, that the hardware has been tested, we know what the features are, I know what I'm getting. Even if this is the last of this, you know, line of this design series, this is good and this is what I want. Whereas I think that the M1 MacBook Pro was an exception, like the redesign, the one in 2021 was an exception. But I think most of us can say like the first generation of like Apple laptops, especially when they do a big hardware redesign, can have some rough edges. And I would personally be be— not to say that I wouldn't buy it, but I would be, especially if I'm going to be spending a lot of money, there would be some hesitation in my mind where I'm going, okay, do I want to trust— because they've made bad decisions before.

Christina Warren [01:11:57]:
If you went from the 2015 MacBook Pro to the 2016 MacBook Pro, you're going to hate your life because they ruined it. They ruined the laptop. And I don't think that's going to happen again. But I don't think there's an argument to be made, which is if this chip is good enough, I like the hardware, it has all the ports I want, I don't necessarily need to wait for the, the next thing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:19]:
Yeah, and on the broader point, I think it's notable that, um, as Ultra as a new class or a new designation of hardware— you know what, Apple shipped the Mac Studio, they did not call it the Mac Pro. Apple shipped the MacBook Neo, they did not call it the MacBook Mini. I really think they now went to, we're going to create a brand new product name for every different product line that's distinctive, that's marketed towards a distinctive group of people.

Leo Laporte [01:12:43]:
So this is— Sonny Dixon has released, which it could be completely bogus, it could be real, a CAD rendering of the iPhone Fold. Uh, we already knew it was going to be kind of this form factor and this aspect ratio, but, uh, but this isn't— I'm getting in line for that even though it's probably $2,500.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:04]:
You think? $2,000? The speculation is centering around a little bit over $2,000. I've seen as high as $2,900, but that's ridiculous. Yeah, but we're getting at that excellent time of any rumors where if they are intending to launch this in the fall, this is the time where they can't— it's A, it's locked. B, they can't keep control over the information in a way they once have because now they've got to share this with so many other people. This is the time with— so even if it's the exact same design that we might have seen in a rumor like last summer, if it's a new thing today, it's like, you know what, this actually might be genuine CAD files. Maybe disguise just a little bit to make sure that, okay, let's, let's, let's not have that special notch there because only one person has access to the CAD files with that notch there. But this is where if you're starting to, if you want to get excited about a real thing, it's okay to start getting a little bit excited about rumors that you've seen.

Leo Laporte [01:13:56]:
HomePad, according to another leak, Kotsutami, the HomePad, which is the new, I don't know what you call it, HomePod.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:09]:
Why? They saw the rampaging success of Google's Pixel tablet with the magnetic detachable space. We want in on that. We want to stick our hand in that till up to the elbow.

Christina Warren [01:14:19]:
Get that. Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:14:19]:
Um, it could be good, but yeah, this fall perhaps. Smartphone device. Yeah. Gurman said that too, that it's, it's going to be delayed until the fall and it's going to be a fall launch. And that's all because, um, the Apple intelligence stuff is still not there and it's entirely predicated on Apple intelligence and and, and having app interactions with, uh, with app intents and stuff. And, and it sounds like Gurman had it specifically— the— that product is now running 27 and not 26. So that means it's not going to happen until the fall because it's running tvOS. It's based on— it's moved to its base being 27.

Jason Snell [01:14:58]:
I think they've just accepted the fact that for it to be the product they want, also the launch time, they may just have decided that even though the hardware is ready and has been ready, I guess, for a while, that, um, launching it in the fall for the holidays might not be the worst place to do it. And it lets them build off of whatever, uh, stuff is in the 27 releases in terms of AI stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:19]:
Really does underscore exactly how much the failure of, uh, the, the— excuse me, the delays in the timeline of developing Apple Intelligence must have surprised so many people inside Apple. Or was a well-kept secret secret that should have been shared with so many people, that they made so many different kinds of plans that predicated upon Siri will be the new— the new AI Siri is going to be ready by the spring. By all means, let's book the manufacturing, let's make sure we lock down these designs because we are going to have to start selling, selling, selling these devices. And now they don't. They're hoping for 2026, maybe it'll be 2027. They just— I'm glad that they seem to be in a position now where it's like Apple Intelligence is going to be ready when it's ready.

Leo Laporte [01:15:57]:
We haven't had a chance to talk to Christina about this. You were working Before you went back to GitHub, you were working for Google DeepMind. Yeah. Some say— I might be in this group— that Apple hasn't missed the boat by not having Apple Intelligence ready. It's an embarrassment. But in a way, they can sit back. They're going to work with Google, it looks like. Gemini is going to be their, you know, their core model.

Leo Laporte [01:16:23]:
Maybe it benefited them.

Christina Warren [01:16:25]:
What's your take on that? Well, I mean, I think that Gemini— and again, disclosure, like, I used to work at DeepMind and I didn't like know any of these details, obviously, but I worked on Gemini stuff, not that I knew anything about this. Gemini is really good. But Gemini is really good. And it's gotten a lot better. And I think that this— Gemini is actually, I think, a good case study for how you can recover from a fumble. Because Bard was awful the first year or so. Gemini was not good. And then like, you know, 1.5 started to get better.

Christina Warren [01:16:54]:
And then 2.0 was when we really started to see some changes. 2.5, things improved. I I left right as the 3.0 Pro came out, but, but, um, I worked on some stuff leading up to that, and, and they continue to work really hard. And, and from what I saw internally, um, and maybe this is the case at Apple, you know, people seem very committed to really kind of getting out from the feeling of being behind.

Leo Laporte [01:17:18]:
Um, and we've also learned is that this— that these models are somewhat interchangeable. You know, first Claude is on top, Opus 4 or 6 is on top, and then— well, that's the Then ChatGPT-5.4 comes out, then Google Gemini 3 DeepThink comes out and each, you know, and people move around, they go, this one's better, this one's better now, this one's better.

Christina Warren [01:17:36]:
They do. And there's some things that Gemini does that I think are just best in class from anyone, image generation, video stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:17:41]:
Nana Banana 2 is amazing.

Christina Warren [01:17:43]:
Nana Banana period. But even like the Imagen models, which were from a different model family. But regardless, I think that, you know, Apple partnering with Frontier Labs, whoever it was going to be, was smart. And I think it was necessary. I think that it is an embarrassment that they so publicly announced the way that they announced it. What bothers me, because I was at the talk show actually in 2024, I guess, or was it 2020? Yes, 2024, when they made the big Apple intelligence push. And JG was on the show. Yeah, John Grusch.

Christina Warren [01:18:17]:
I was at the live show. And JG She ran Apple Intelligence at the time, or the AI stuff. The way that he was talking about how much and how good their AI stuff was, it strained credulity for me. And I didn't work at DeepMind at the time, but I did work in AI. And I knew a lot about it. And I was sitting next to a friend of mine. And we were texting, kind of backchanneling the whole time, like, this doesn't seem right. This doesn't pass the smell test.

Christina Warren [01:18:45]:
What they're saying for what they can achieve on the local levels and with the hardware that they're using in their data centers and all this stuff, this is, this is not accurate. This is just not accurate from what the reality of the space is. And so putting any of the engineering issues, you know, otherwise, like on the consumer side aside, like, I just don't feel like they had the foundation. And I feel like it is an embarrassment. They are behind. I wouldn't say that this is an advantage that they are saying, oh, this was a good thing that they were so summarily embarrassed. I'm not going to say that. But I do think that this—

Leo Laporte [01:19:14]:
it wasn't as bad a thing as it could have been.

Christina Warren [01:19:17]:
Well, I think that they were smart to partner with, you know, ChatGPT first about kind of giving that as an option to do things. And I think that they were smart to come out and say that, you know, announce the partnership with Google about how that's going to work. What is going to be difficult, quite frankly, is that, A, I don't think that any of the— and let's just call it what it was. Vaporware, because it was, that they showed off at WWE 2024. I don't know if any of those scenarios are ever actually going to be things that we see in a realistic way, right? I just think we all have to kind of pretend like it was, it was like, you know, an old TV show episode. It was all a dream, right? Like that, that's just not going to be. Thank you, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:55]:
I'm glad you got the reference. I'm sorry. Terrible, terrible. Uh, the Dallas reveal is the bridge that connects Gen X with millennials.

Christina Warren [01:20:04]:
It truly is. It truly is.

Leo Laporte [01:20:05]:
And we learned about it from like, Intelligence is what you're saying.

Christina Warren [01:20:09]:
Exactly. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Right. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [01:20:18]:
Okay.

Christina Warren [01:20:18]:
Now that's an AI video that I want to like somebody to use Sora or somebody to create.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:23]:
Cause that would be hilarious. I'm going to note that as a show title.

Christina Warren [01:20:29]:
But no, I mean, you know, I think we also forget about what we were going to see with Now though, I think that this does give them an opportunity to kind of create, especially if they can lose— this is the hard thing. They sold everyone so hard on doing all this locally and what that means for your privacy. Now that they're actually like, actually, we have to do things in data centers because we, we can't do this locally the way that we wanted to. It's going to complicate the messaging some. I think that that's, you know, surmountable. I think they can totally get past that. But that's, that's going to complicate things a little bit. What I hope, though, is that they can show off some really good experiences and things that you can do and then talk about, oh, well, these are our data centers and that our data centers are not like the other data centers, even though maybe.

Christina Warren [01:21:12]:
And we might actually get use cases out of it, which would be the good thing because I don't know about the three of you, I turn Apple Intelligence off in as many venues as I can.

Leo Laporte [01:21:22]:
Oh, yeah. Actually, I like the summaries, but mostly for their humor.

Christina Warren [01:21:26]:
Right, right. But we talked about this last week with Michael. We were like, when was the last time you used an Apple Intelligence? Intelligence feature, and we were kind of like, I don't know. Sometimes it's on and I'll see things, but it's kind of like Siri, which has become a punchline. That is the one thing, and I'll shut up. I hope that they just rebrand Siri because that was, I think, the best lesson they could take from Google. Google saw that Bard was a punchline and it was not going to work, and they rebranded it. Siri has been a punchline since it existed.

Leo Laporte [01:21:53]:
Maybe that's what this little Mac guy is going to be.

Christina Warren [01:21:56]:
Maybe it's just—

Leo Laporte [01:21:56]:
I mean, that would be huge.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:58]:
Yeah, a Clippy for Generation Alpha.

Leo Laporte [01:22:02]:
All right, let's take a break. When we come back, we have more to talk about, including a big change that might be a sign of the times. As effort tease, you're watching MacBreak Weekly with Christina Warren. Great to have you and your brains on the show. Andy Ihnatko, great to have you and your baseball caps on the show.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:26]:
And thanks.

Leo Laporte [01:22:27]:
Nice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:27]:
And I've got— I think I have several baseball caps so I can bring deliverance so much to the show.

Leo Laporte [01:22:31]:
He's wearing a Bosox cap today. And Jason Snell and his lemons and limes, his citrus on the shows. That's right. Uh, show today brought to you by my mattress. You know, in all— everybody's got a trademark, all right? I'm just saying, my mattress from Helix Sleep, I happen to think is a pretty good, uh, trademark these days. I love of my Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? You know, it'd be a good time to put that old mattress on the curb. You can put a little sign, free mattress, uh, upgrade maybe to a Helix mattress and get a good night's sleep.

Leo Laporte [01:23:08]:
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That crisp desert air. And it's done within days of placing your order. They make it to order, so that's nice. You can also do what we did, which is take the Helix sleep quiz, which matches you with the perfect mattress based on both your personal preferences and how you sleep, your sleep needs. And it really works. I have to tell you, the most important sleep— and I've been working as I get older harder and harder on getting more deep sleep, and the Helix has made a big difference for me. In a Wesper sleep study, they found the same thing. Helix measured the sleep performance of participants who did what we did, switched from their old mattress to a Helix mattress, and they found 82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle.

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Leo Laporte [01:25:49]:
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Leo Laporte [01:26:20]:
She loves it too. She doesn't get more sleep though. She wakes up at 6 AM no matter what and says, feed me. So, uh, a change on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio that reflects a sign of the times. You can no longer get it with 512 gigs of RAM. Is this Apple admitting that RAM has become a really big cost center for them?

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:46]:
Your guess is as good as mine. It feels like they— it feels like they— all the reports from like supply chain reporting has always been that Apple has managed to figure out deals to make sure they get enough RAM. There was a recent article about how So they basically had to allow Samsung to strong-arm them a little bit on price to make sure they still have stock. I'm wondering if they're, they, as we often say in the show, Apple knows exactly who's buying their hardware and what hardware is selling. I think they're def— I would guess this is a sign that they're in a position where we have enough RAM for all of the machines that sell really, really well. The ones that are flagging, we are kind of okay with being a month late or 2 months late on shipping. We make sure that we can sell the ones that are in high demand and high profit.

Leo Laporte [01:27:35]:
Yeah. And I mean, it was— was it $4,000 for the 512?

Christina Warren [01:27:41]:
Yeah. It was a $10,000 machine, I think. And people bought them. People did who were doing like local workloads of LLM stuff and whatnot. And presumably, my guess was I was like, the majority of these are probably in Apple's data centers for Apple stuff. But, but if Apple Intelligence is now going to be presumably using different types of hardware, probably Google's TPUs, you know, in Apple's data centers, who knows if they need it for that purpose. But also to Andy's point, this is just speculation. Even if they did pre, you know, set RAM prices with the suppliers for a certain period of time, A, that is probably going to run out at a certain point.

Christina Warren [01:28:17]:
B, you know, might be just to look at like, okay, if we're not selling enough of these in volume and we have have these RAM chips, right, lying around, wouldn't it behoove us when we are actually in a position where we can sell things and, and our astronomical RAM prices look normal, um, to, to, you know, shove these chips, um, in?

Leo Laporte [01:28:35]:
So maybe they don't have them lying around is the thing, you know.

Christina Warren [01:28:38]:
I mean, maybe they don't. I don't know. I, I, I, I'm not viewing this as they don't have it around and maybe just we're allocating it in a different way.

Jason Snell [01:28:48]:
Also I mean, there's probably a Mac Studio announcement coming.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:52]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Snell [01:28:53]:
And it's possible that they don't want to make any more of the high— like, that they're running out of that configuration. They're like, we're just gonna make it—

Leo Laporte [01:29:02]:
we're gonna take it down, we're gonna sunset that product, and what do you think? A lot of people are saying the M5 competes well with the M3 Ultra.

Jason Snell [01:29:13]:
Oh yeah, it's very good. It is, um, I mean, I only had the Pro, not the Max. The Max has twice as many GPU cores, but like, it's very— I mean, Apple keeps ratcheting up performance. Plus they've just, you know, year to year, and then they threw in a bunch of accelerators for GPU for AI. So the AI performance in the M5 generation is very impressive. And of course, don't forget that there's SuperCores now in there.

Leo Laporte [01:29:41]:
Oh yeah, you made fun of that. So they took They took the efficiency cores and they realized people think efficiency means slow. Means slow. Yeah. They've called those performance cores. I think it's more than that.

Jason Snell [01:29:52]:
Performance cores, they're now calling Supercores. So they retroactively named the high-level cores on all M5 Supercores, even if they sold them as performance cores before. I was, I was literally writing that story on an M5 iPad Pro and I was, and I was able to write, well, apparently I had Supercores and didn't even know it. But what happened is And they're using the, what they call the classic efficiency cores in the M5, but in the M5 Pro and Max, it's a different, that lower core is a different design. And my understanding is it's more in common with performance cores than the old efficiency cores.

Leo Laporte [01:30:24]:
So it's not just a renaming.

Jason Snell [01:30:25]:
It really is not. It's not. They are different cores than are in the low level of the, the lower of the two core sets in the M5. So it's different.

Leo Laporte [01:30:33]:
The problem I have is the chiplet thing that we were talking about.

Jason Snell [01:30:38]:
Well, no, I mean, this is, no, this is independent from that. This is just what they decided to do. Decided to do on the, on the CPU part of the M5 Pro and M5 Max. Um, they did this new design. Uh, I think it is based on what used to be the performance core. So they called it the performance core. That's the confusing part is they're calling the new, like the high thing is now the low thing, which is just very weird. And then the new high thing has a new name, or as I said, uh, Batman is now Superman and Robin is now Batman.

Jason Snell [01:31:03]:
Apparently that was the line. That was just a little confusing. It might be super girl. It's unclear. Anyway, the metaphor is not perfect, but, but the point is, I think they just got tired of saying, why do we call it efficiency? It sounds like it's a, you know, it's a pair of corrective, you know, inserts for your shoes or something. It's like, it's— these are very powerful. And, and I think with this engineering change where they used a different core, that is, you know, the idea— and they also changed the layout, right? The ratio of, of the high-level cores to the lower-level cores used to be different. And what this— these chips have fewer super cores and more what are now performance cores.

Jason Snell [01:31:44]:
And I think that's part of it too, is that what they want is they want these cores that can peak when there's like an enormous need, um, uh, for performance from a thread that they have the ability to provide that. But for the rest of stuff, they've got, you know, 10 of these pretty good cores that can run in the background, multi-threaded, and be very effective without using enormous amounts of power. Because in the end, that's their goal is power efficiency, but they can change that envelope a little bit when they know it's only going to go in pro laptops or pro systems with fans. So that, you know, they don't have to worry about it quite as much in terms of the power and in terms of the thermals. So that's, that's what they're, that's what they're doing. It, but But ultimately the reason we noticed is that in the M5 generation, there are two different kinds of lower tier CPU cores. And they, and then they, they changed the name because I think they just really had a complex about the name efficiency.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:43]:
So they changed it. The big deal seems to be what they're calling Fusion, which seems to be a good ploy for not necessarily, I think most of the benchmarks and reviews from like people who review CPUs have been saying, okay, M5s,, we're, we're saying about 10 to 12% faster than the M4. But again, you're not generally not upgrading year over year, it's like every 3 years. Uh, but there was a lot of glow, a lot of very, a lot of positivity from engineers about the Fusion architecture. Basically not necessarily that this is making this current generation of M5s amazingly fantastically performant, but that this seems like a way to solve some problems that Apple and the entire industry might have had with scaling for the next 2, 3, or 4 years, because it allows you to basically bake your own cookie as opposed to being limited to whatever fab technology that you've got. You can put whatever— I'm hungry. It's— I didn't have— I had a banana for breakfast and some—

Jason Snell [01:33:34]:
gotta bake your own cookie. No, it's, it's by doing these chiplets or what— however the 2.5D or TSMC has got their own term— the idea is you're making a chip out of component parts in a way that they didn't do before. And it does mean for Apple strategy where they have this Pro and the Max chip that have have the same CPU cores, but different GPU cores, or, you know, the Max has more that you could create a bunch of these little chiplets that are the CPU part for all the Pros and the Maxes. And you make that on, on the silicon wafers, you do, you produce all of those. And then separately you produce these GPU cores and however they do that, whether they're cutting them or whether they're doing the Pro ones and the Max ones, and then you fuse them together in this chiplet architecture. And it's really interesting for what it might mean for future other Apple Silicon chips, right? It means that they might be able to have even like more tiers of how many GPUs there are, and you can kind of mix and match. There are limits in terms of the interconnection and because the, the memory and the, and the GPUs and the CPUs all need to be very close together, uh, so that they can share that pool of memory. But, um, it, it potentially gives them a lot more flexibility and efficiency, right? Because they're building the little parts and then putting them together.

Jason Snell [01:34:44]:
Whereas before it was all a single unit and if there was a failure on it, you have to be in or trash the whole unit.

Leo Laporte [01:34:55]:
Um, Apple Music is going to add tags so that you can distinguish AI music. I like that.

Jason Snell [01:35:02]:
Yeah, I think that's good.

Christina Warren [01:35:03]:
Yeah, I think that's good. I will say it's interesting, we— I don't remember it was on this show if we talked about it, um, might have been a different podcast I was on. Um, but, uh, the AI playlist feature Spotify's is really good Apple Music's, um, I, I will, uh, you know, have to wait to see what that looks like, but I don't have my hopes up. But, um, I do actually like having that tagging. I think that that transparency is nice.

Leo Laporte [01:35:27]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although you should be able to tell, but actually you can't, can you?

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:32]:
It doesn't— it only affects like new stuff they're adding to the store. It's, it's on the— the burden is on the labels. But yeah, that's going to be super, super important. But wouldn't it break all of of our hearts if it's like nobody, nobody cares that this music that they like is completely AI-generated and that there's this, this farm somewhere that just posts 1,000 songs a day to cover every single bet possible.

Leo Laporte [01:35:52]:
That's like, well, that's what's on Spotify, isn't it?

Christina Warren [01:35:55]:
I mean, that's what's going on.

Jason Snell [01:35:56]:
Some of it is, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:58]:
Is it happening in Apple Music in the same degree?

Christina Warren [01:36:01]:
People usually upload to both places, but because Spotify has free tier, they tend to prioritize that more. And I'll also say this, this. It is much easier to search and find things on Spotify than it is on Apple Music. So I don't actually know, to be completely honest with you. And I say this as somebody who uses Apple Music every single day, except on my Mac. I will not use it on the Mac. The Mac experience is so awful that I pay for Spotify Premium so that I can listen to music on my computer, which is awful. But I don't know.

Christina Warren [01:36:32]:
It's probably not as bad. But that isn't to say that the, the usually when people upload things, it can submit them to all the streaming services at once.

Leo Laporte [01:36:40]:
So there'd be nothing to stop anyone from submitting their slop to speak all the places. Speaking of AI, Apple researchers ran an A/B test on the App Store to see if AI could improve search results. Anything Apple could do to improve search results on the App Store would be beneficial. AI-generated relevant Labels did improve App Store search conversions, not a lot, 0.24%. But you know, uh, that makes it— I guess, you know, it adds up. They have a lot of users. Uh, LLM-augmented users who saw results ranked using the LLM-augmented model downloaded at least one app 0.24% more often. Than users who saw the traditional search results.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:33]:
Okay, our dark patterns are now darker. Still not a proper black because we are still our Apple designers. It will only ever be sort of a grayish sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [01:37:44]:
And Apple is apparently blocking— geo-blocking downloads and updates of ByteDance-owned apps in the US. So I'm sure they were doing geo-blocking of apps in China, but now they're geo-blocking Chinese-owned apps in the US, maybe related to the TikTok divestiture.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:06]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:38:06]:
Yeah, I believe that's a requirement.

Christina Warren [01:38:10]:
Is it? Oh, okay. That might be the case. And I assume they've already put CapCut and, you know, TikTok and anything else.

Leo Laporte [01:38:15]:
It's part of the ban then. Ah, okay. Uh, Apple explained that ByteDance's apps remain available for download in all other countries and regions where they are available. So they're available where they are available. However, yeah, they are not available in the United States thanks to—

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:35]:
remember that TikTok, TikTok is being run under a different entity now.

Leo Laporte [01:38:38]:
So yeah, that's how that TikTok got past the goalie.

Jason Snell [01:38:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:44]:
Um, there is, uh, a security toolkit, or an insecurity toolkit for hacking iPhones, possibly created for by the US government. Google's threat intelligence group— there's a new and powerful exploit kit, Caruna. This, by the way, was why you got an Apple update a couple of weeks ago to block Caruna. Uh, it affected— that's why people with older iPhones got updates as well. It affected iPhone models running iOS 13 up to 17.2.1. Uh, it contained 5 full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. Uh, this is the kind of thing nation-states create to hack highly targeted individuals, so probably nothing we should worry about.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:38]:
Nevertheless, yeah, Google Threat Intelligence had a really nice blog post about it that was kind of explaining The, the, the, it's my favorite kinds of these warnings are where it's a combination 50/50 warning people about this threat and also admiration for how clever this threat is, right? Uh, they were pointing out that it uses a hitherto unseen way of masking its JavaScript. It creates a very, very thorough fingerprint of the device and picks exactly the right exploit within a library of exploits to, to apply and was some pretty bad mojo.

Leo Laporte [01:40:12]:
Yeah, no kidding. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, and Christina Warren. We're glad you're here, especially glad if you are a Club Twit member. Thank you, Club Twit members, for making this show possible. If you're not a Club Twit member, boy, we sure would like to have you in the club. Uh, it's a great place to be. We love our Club Twit members.

Leo Laporte [01:40:31]:
We've got the Discord where we can all hang out and chat chat and have a great time. And we do a lot of special programming, uh, in the Discord. In fact, we've got some big events coming up, uh, very soon in our Club Twit Discord. Uh, Thursday I'm going to interview Cindy Cohen about her new book. She's the, uh, at the EFF, she's the general counsel, uh, there and has a new book, uh, that looks to be very, very, uh, interesting. So she'll be joining us We actually had to change the time, or I had to change the time. Uh, 1 PM on Thursday Pacific Time. Privacy's Defender is her new book, My 30-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.

Leo Laporte [01:41:15]:
Executive Director of EFF Cindy Cohn will be joining us. That's 1 PM. If you're a club member, you can watch that, uh, in the club. We also have, uh, a coverage of the GTC keynote next Monday. Uh, we're always interested what Jensen Huang has to say, and this is going to be a particularly interesting keynote. He's already teased some new stuff that might be very interesting. Plus our AI user group every, uh, every normally first Friday. I was out of town last week, so it's going to be this Friday, 2 PM Pacific.

Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
So we do these for the club members. We actually stream them live and we put them out, uh, a month later for everybody, for the general public. But if you're in the club, you can see all of the stuff we do in our Twit+ feed. The club also really makes a big difference in how we do our jobs. Without the club, we would have to make severe cutbacks. It's about a third of our operating costs now. But unfortunately, it's only about 1.5% of our audience. And I would really like to get that number up.

Leo Laporte [01:42:17]:
If you listen to our shows, you like our shows, and you want them to continue, the best way to do that is to invest at twit.tv/clubtwit. We would love to have you join the club. On we go. Let's see what else is going on. Oh, did you watch the F1 race on Apple TV?

Jason Snell [01:42:40]:
I—

Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
it was funny, I ended up watching it on the F1 TV app, which still works. I tied it to my Apple account. Because I realized my Apple TV hadn't updated to 26. You need to have Mac TVOS 26. And for some reason it hadn't updated. It was still on 18. I couldn't understand. It's like, "Where is it? Where is it?" So dumb me, I thought, "Well, maybe I need to update." And it took a couple of times.

Leo Laporte [01:43:07]:
The Apple TV was not updating. I had to really force it. But once it did, it's over there on the right. Looks good, doesn't it, Jason? It's 4K.

Jason Snell [01:43:16]:
Yeah. 4K Dolby audio. Yeah. HDR with 5.1 audio. And they, they had a bunch of, you know, I played around with a multi-view, which looks really nice. Um, so you can put, you know, a driver or, or 2 or 3 in the window next to the broadcast. Although, you know, even, even for me, I feel like the, the main broadcast is the, is the thing. And I switched over to the Sky broadcast and then switched back because you can do that too.

Jason Snell [01:43:42]:
I just, you know, I kind of just ran through to see what it was like. And did you try it on the Vision Pro? I did not try it on the Vision Pro and add a fifth thing. I should do that. I've been, I've been a little busy.

Leo Laporte [01:43:53]:
You had to write all those reviews over the weekend.

Jason Snell [01:43:55]:
I've been a little busy. How many reviews did you write over the weekend? Okay. I only wrote 2 reviews, but I also had to write, you know, I wrote pieces in the aftermath of the event when I was flying. On the plane flying back, and then I wrote something in the, in the airport after the briefing on the way there. And it's been a busy— yeah, and then all weekend.

Christina Warren [01:44:17]:
So I took time out to watch. But Jason, you did 2 reviews for 2 new— one a brand new product, one granted it was an upgrade— in a week. That alone, I mean, look, I've been on this grind.

Jason Snell [01:44:28]:
I, I know, I, I know, I know how the grind goes, but I'm just saying, like, to be fair, I mean, that, that MacBook Pro review is, isn't— it's 1,000 words. I got I got 3,000 words out of it, but it's mostly, look, a lot of these reviews, especially about products that have just had a little chip turnover, end up being kind of an essay about like, John Gruber, bless his heart. He wrote this enormous story about the iPhone 17e. There's nothing to say about the iPhone 17e, and he wrote so much about it because—

Leo Laporte [01:44:53]:
In fact, we haven't said nothing about it on this show.

Jason Snell [01:44:56]:
Amazingly.

Christina Warren [01:44:56]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:44:56]:
So what happens is it becomes an essay about what, you know, what Apple is doing in that category, where they've been, where they might be going, aspects of it. Like, Dan Moran did a whole section in the MacBook Air review on Six Colors about the glyphs that they changed on the keyboard.

Christina Warren [01:45:13]:
So the US, which I like, I, I, I liked that. I saw that. Um, also, I think you guys linked to, uh, Martian Wimbley's, uh, um, blog about, uh, how terrible the global—

Jason Snell [01:45:24]:
oh yeah, yeah, the globe key. Yeah, exactly. So So when it comes to a thousand words about the, I mean, I spent a lot of time on the, on the MacBook Neo story. There's no doubt about it. Um, but I also was writing a different story that is going to not see the light of day for a couple of weeks before I started writing the MacBook Neo review. I used it to write a different story that I can't talk about because it'll be on someone else's site in a few weeks. It's not the Wall Street Journal again, but it's a nice site that asked me to write something for them. So I did all of that too, which is beneath the waterline.

Jason Snell [01:45:52]:
So you can't even see it., I get to the point where I've got about 2 hours before the embargo is going to drop on the MacBook Pro. And I think, I think I could write something. And I wrote about 1,000 words that is kind of what we've talked about here, which is who's this for? And the answer is, you know, some people would rather be in the last cycle, the last model year before they change to a new car body and start again.

Christina Warren [01:46:17]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:46:17]:
They'd rather buy something that they totally know it's this. Modern MacBook Pro design that we've had for 5 years and have that and run that for another 10 years. And then there are the other people who are like, no, I want the first iteration of the brand new thing, even if it's weird, even if it's got things we don't know about it, I'm going to hold out. And like, that's the question is who, which one are you? And then I broke down the chip stuff a little bit. I had already written the thing about all the cores, so I couldn't do that, but consider that like an ancillary. And, and, you know, I was able in an hour and a half to to do 10, you know, do 1,000 words in a chart and get it out. Because frankly, for the 5th iteration of that laptop, there isn't a lot more to say other than to talk about chips.

Christina Warren [01:46:55]:
You still have to benchmark it and whatnot. So I'm trying to give you, I'm trying to like pre-save you because I've been on the grind that you've been on and it's, and just like Andy has, and it's a lot. And it is a lot, but it's rare that there are this many new things they will seed you at the same time.

Jason Snell [01:47:11]:
Well, so I've got a Studio Display here that I haven't written about at all. Well, which I can. Well, I took some screenshots of the webcam, so. Okay, there'll be something. But again, not a lot to say about it. I don't have the XDR, I just have the stock and I just got the iPhone 17e. So I mean, how do I even— can I just link to Gruber's story and say, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. But, but I think— but the truth with a lot of these, especially you have to get creative.

Jason Snell [01:47:36]:
They force you to get creative when, when all Apple is doing is just doing a chip update on a product that we know very well. You end up having that moment where you think, and ideally when you're in the shower or you're just getting out of bed in the morning or whatever, you have that moment, or as you're drifting off to sleep where you're like, oh, that's the angle I can use on that story. Cause you gotta get creative. You gotta think big picture. You gotta focus on something that intrigues you like Dan did with the glyphs on the keyboard, because it isn't much of a story unto itself. It's more like, what What, what story can I tell around on the occasion of the release of this product?

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:13]:
Sometimes, sometimes it really is an opportunity to say, okay, I'm going to get my reader's attention on the iPhone 17e because it is a brand new release and they're probably clicking around looking for things. This, there is nothing interesting to say about the phone, but I can use that attention to get, to get them to, to, to share an opinion that that maybe they would not be reading otherwise. And it's, I mean, it is, it is a, I imagine this is exactly the same as when you're a movie critic where it's like, this is a movie I've seen 100 times before. There's nothing unique about it. There's nothing special about it, but it releases this week and I have to release and it's a, it's a, it's a main release. So I have to say something about it. I know I'm going to turn it into an essay about this cute bug that I saw in when I was taking a walk through 3 or 4 weeks ago. Because they don't pay me enough times to simply write an essay about cute bugs that I see during my walks through the forest.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:07]:
Yeah. So sorry, Transformers 9 fans.

Jason Snell [01:49:09]:
That's what you're getting with this review. Anyway, I encourage people to read John Gruber's review of the iPhone 17e because literally that's a product where I'm like, I don't know if I have anything to say about this. And then I open up during Fireball and it's like, oh my God. What did he find to say? I mean, he has so much. He does a chart about, okay, here's the, actually it is, I mean, this is why he's very good at what he does is the 17E is interesting in part because of positioning of like, where does that phone fit in iPhone, in the iPhone product line? And why do they still sell his, one of his points is why do they still sell the iPhone 16? Don't buy that, right? Like, don't buy that. Why would you do that? Buy the 17E of the 17. It's, you know, but, but that's what he ends up kind of going down the rabbit hole on more than anything is is what's Apple— I love this stuff too— what's Apple's business strategy with the iPhone? They sell so many iPhones that, that in volume that it gives them the luxury to kind of like create iPhones that are targeted at market segments. And the 17 is a very particular one that we've only really had now.

Jason Snell [01:50:12]:
This is the second year where they've done an annual update. So that's what he ends up spending his time on.

Leo Laporte [01:50:18]:
And like, sure, he's a pro. This chart is very telling because it's the only $600 iPhone. And so, yeah, that's— I think this is a good, good—

Jason Snell [01:50:28]:
I mean, it's good, but this is the— this is the challenge that I appreciate. I was trying to— Christina's right. It is a— it is a personality flaw to try to deflect comment— compliments. I don't know how to take them. But I will say, yeah, this is just— I know this is super writer inside baseball, but like, this is the truth of it is sometimes It isn't a bad story. It ends up being you're forced to think different. Oh no, I can't believe I said that about what you're writing.

Christina Warren [01:50:54]:
You have to, you have to think, you have to think differently.

Jason Snell [01:50:55]:
A real review is easy, right? Because it's a brand new product and I can deal with all the issues. When it's a product that's not so easy, you're like, what am I going to do? And sometimes that can lead to boring reviews, but other times it can lead to good stuff about oblique things. Maybe not the bug I saw.

Leo Laporte [01:51:11]:
At the park, but maybe, maybe both you and Christina seem to agree that the new Studio Display is not worth spending the money on.

Jason Snell [01:51:21]:
Well, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna liken it to an Apple iPhone case.

Christina Warren [01:51:26]:
So bear with me here for a second. No, that makes sense.

Jason Snell [01:51:28]:
I see where you're going. For some people, for some people, look, because you could always buy a cheaper case than the one that comes from the Apple Store or from Apple's website. But there is an audience for whom the ease of saying, click, click, click, I'll buy a Mac Studio and a Mac display. Yeah, that's great. And I'm gone. Is like Apple wants to have that as an option because some people don't care that it costs more or that it's a little bit behind spec. It's first off, it's Apple. It's got all the nice things that Apple does.

Jason Snell [01:51:59]:
And it is, they are nice displays. They're great displays. And they don't care. Like they don't— there's— it's so easy. It's right there. I can buy my Mac and I can buy this with it. You— it is a— for anyone who wants to do the work to find better value, find different options, like you can shop and find a way better deal than the Studio Display, even the new one that will run with something besides a Mac. Besides a Mac, right? If you want to run a PlayStation on it or something.

Christina Warren [01:52:27]:
This is my problem this year.

Jason Snell [01:52:30]:
Yeah, exactly.

Christina Warren [01:52:30]:
But genuinely, that's why that's my beef this year.

Leo Laporte [01:52:32]:
That is why it exists. You can't even run it on an Intel Mac.

Christina Warren [01:52:37]:
Nope. Right, right. That's ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And that's the part where, like, this year with the displays, like, I was disappointed. I ranted last week. I think that, like, the— I'm not even going to talk about the XDR. I'm not even going to get into that mess.

Christina Warren [01:52:48]:
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm not even entertaining that sort of nonsense of spending $3,300 on something you can only use with a Mac when the big selling feature is 120, uh, hertz, which was primarily beneficial for gaming, which is not a thing you can do on the Mac and certainly not at the resolutions, uh, that, uh, that, that you would need on that. Like, no, uh, I'm not gonna even entertain that. But if you like to burn money, by all means, please do it. Enjoy yourself. This— the, the new Studio Display though does bother me because I've, I've had the old one for 4 years. Um, it's a great display even though it was overpriced when I bought it. It's still overpriced now. You can— there are are, you know, 4 years ago there really weren't any alternatives on the market.

Christina Warren [01:53:28]:
There are now finally a lot of really good 5K displays. I know you reviewed the Samsung one, which was terrible, Jason, but since then— but the good ones now.

Leo Laporte [01:53:37]:
Yeah. What do you recommend? The Fuji? What do you— what do you recommend?

Christina Warren [01:53:39]:
The Fujitsu? What is it? The— well, well, I will— Acer and Asus both have some. And I think— and I think— I think BenQ as well for people who have like longer warranties. LG has a 6K 32-inch display. If it's $2,000, um, but I think that ASUS has one that's, that's, uh, $1,600 for 32 inches in 6K. Um, Qoocoo, which is a Chinese company, um, basically they knocked off the Studio Display XDR look. It's going to be weird what the warranty is going to be on that, but it's glossy and it's beautiful and it works with other things. But this is just kind of my beef with the Studio Display. It's not even the price.

Christina Warren [01:54:14]:
The price, it is what it is. It, it is for what it is. It's the fact that that before you could at least with enough effort get the display to work with non-Apple things. Right. Now you're literally saying not only easily, but you could if you had, you know, USB 4 laptops. I had those worked fine with it. I had Thunderbolt, you know, on an AMD chip that I bought specifically the motherboard so it worked with my Studio Display. You know, like that kind of thing, right? Like it wasn't easy, but you could make it work.

Christina Warren [01:54:44]:
Now, OK, I have to buy this monitor, but I can only use it with my Macs. And that just feels like—

Jason Snell [01:54:52]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:54:52]:
I don't know. I'm not going to tell people not to buy it, but I'm also going to be like, you have better options unless you just are so enamored with the aesthetics of a thing that most of us have on an Ergotron arm, and we don't look at the back of it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:09]:
Yeah, it's very Apple 2014. Yeah, attitude. Yeah, like it's pretty— you're locked in, but you got the money and you're gonna spend it, so this is why we're making it.

Jason Snell [01:55:18]:
Yeah, it's not bad. Yeah, it's just, it's so limited and there are better options. And this is the thing, like, in fact, to Christina's point, when Apple abandoned the display market, what happened is the display market said, oh, I guess nobody cares about Mac users, and there were no displays that were any good for Mac users. They really weren't. So the most important, I would argue the most important thing about the Studio Display is that it exists because Apple is validating a market. And then everybody's like, oh man, we can undercut Apple. And they have. And, and now you can do those shopping.

Jason Snell [01:55:47]:
So I'm glad it exists. I'm glad they still do it. I wish, like people are harping on them using the same panel for 10 years. It's a good panel. I don't want a 5K, like I would take higher resolution or higher refresh rate. I don't want to I don't need it. I don't actually personally want a bigger display than 27. It works for me really well.

Jason Snell [01:56:08]:
But the fact that when my kid came home for the summer, he couldn't hook up his PlayStation to the extra Studio Display that I had in the house.

Christina Warren [01:56:15]:
It's just so frustrating. Or your Switch or Steam Deck or anything.

Jason Snell [01:56:18]:
So like the idea that you could do something like lower the price or now that it's been out there for a while, uh, you know, but, Be that as apples be an apple, they will sell a certain number of these. Somebody was saying, you know, that's a lot of money to overspend on being lazy, but like that is the name of the game for some people. A few extra hundred dollars for the convenience of not having to do shopping for a display from somebody that isn't Apple at the Apple Store is nothing. And that's who this laptop or this display is for. But for everybody else, I would, if you're watching MacBreak Weekly, I would strongly encourage you to look at the other options out there because there are now options that are appropriate sizes with appropriate dot, you know, dots per inch that will work as external Mac displays that are, that are as good or better than Apple's display for a lot less money. And, uh, and that's why I want Apple to keep making displays, because as long as Apple makes a display, the display industry will try to undercut them on price. And that's great for us if you want to do shopping.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:22]:
Like I said last week, I think that this— Apple makes a Magic Mouse and they make it like that because they know there's a lot of competition and people who want a normal mouse for a normal price can go absolutely anywhere and get it. They may as well make one that is very, very Apple-y for fans of Apple design. And like Jason said, for people who just want, okay, click, click, click, click, boom, ship, I'll have it tomorrow. Uh, and I think I've always thought that the displays were in that exact same category.

Jason Snell [01:57:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, like a, like an iPhone case. I'm just— shocker for people who buy an Apple iPhone case every year. Lots of companies make cases and like some of them are as good as Apple's and they're like half the price or Apple Watch bands.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:58]:
And like, and some of them are even made out of cow.

Jason Snell [01:58:02]:
It's awesome. It's, it's true. My wife's iPhone case is a leather case now. And it's like, they'd still do that. It's like, well, not Apple, but everybody else does. It does. So, um, so yeah, it's like, it's perfectly reasonable, but, but you just have to know if you want to be a savvy shopper that the Studio Display, even the brand new one that just came out, it's a bad deal. It was a bad deal last week and the new one is still a bad deal.

Jason Snell [01:58:25]:
It's just a bad deal with a better webcam.

Christina Warren [01:58:28]:
So whatever, a better webcam and you can't use it with any of your older Macs. I think that's the only thing that really does come to mind.

Jason Snell [01:58:33]:
You can daisy chain it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:34]:
Daisy chaining is nice, but like, whatever. You can see your own regret in and remarkable clarity.

Christina Warren [01:58:41]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, and look, like, I'm glad the webcam is at least apparently not garbage now, which great.

Jason Snell [01:58:46]:
Um, I think that's about all I would say is you can— you—

Christina Warren [01:58:49]:
there are better webcams available. I was going to say the irony was, I think, and I, I made the justification when I bought the Mac Studio, uh, display literally the second it went for pre-order, and I had an UltraFine 5K. So that was dumb of me in some ways, but I was like, I've waited for this, I want this, I'll get it. It. I sold my, um, UltraFine actually, and, um, I think it was fine. Um, but I was like, I know this webcam is going to suck, I'm just going to use Nexjournal, that's not a big deal. I think most people who— if you're gonna overspend 4 years ago, you'll just buy a new webcam. Yep.

Christina Warren [01:59:20]:
Again, like, and I get it, they're getting rid of Intel, blah blah blah. That is just my one sticking point, because even though I have 2 32-inch 6K monitors that I love, and they have— it has Thunderbolt 5 and it has a I am, you know, switching. It's, it's great. It's not as bright, but it's, you know, it's, it's, um, very nice. I would buy another one. I would just for, for other purposes. But if I can't even use it with my older Macs, like, because I would put it in the kitchen or something, but if I, but if I can't do that, like, or, you know, like I'd replace the one on my desk and then put the one on my desk in another room. But I don't know, that just, it feels defeatist to just be like, we literally are going to make this possible for you to get any more value out of this very expensive display.

Jason Snell [02:00:01]:
I would like to, um, and somebody out there might be doing this, but I haven't found it yet. I know there are lots of display review sites and, uh, YouTube channels out there, but they are, they tend not to be Mac focused. And this is one of those moments, I said this on another podcast last week, I want to mention it here. I really, this is when I really miss, not all the other stuff, this is when I really miss being the editor of Macworld.

Christina Warren [02:00:23]:
Yes, because you could test them all, call them all in.

Jason Snell [02:00:25]:
We would buy them, we would buy or order depending on whether we could get them, all of the good appropriate Mac displays and we would review them all together and we would come up with answers. And the problem is we have this conversation, then people say like Leo did earlier, well, what, what are the good ones? And we kind of don't know because like there are sites that review them that you can find good ones, but that's not necessarily, are they good with the Mac?

Christina Warren [02:00:50]:
Exactly. No. And there's like a MacRumors thread and that's probably the best source of information genuinely for the 5K displays and for kind of—

Jason Snell [02:00:57]:
if it's the case, but those people all bought them individually where what you really want is to have them in a room together.

Christina Warren [02:01:03]:
No, I, no, I agree with you. And then it's funny because some of those people will like do their own video reviews and whatnot. And I'm like, I've been, um, I haven't been able to, but I've been asked to do like a, I will, the review of the LG UltraFine 6K and I will do one, but even in my setup and I know how to to properly, you know, calibrate and do whatnot. I don't have the sort of testing environment that I could dedicate to that, but in a perfect world, I'm with you, Jason. Like, I would like totally love to either have access to like a YouTube channel or something else where it's like, yeah, we can call all these in, order them, and do like a proper, you know, like shootout.

Jason Snell [02:01:33]:
Like, that would— that does exist. People should write in and let us know because I know that like RTINGS is out there and does great TV reviews.

Christina Warren [02:01:41]:
I'm sure there are sites that are super display-focused. RTINGS Artings did, because it was upvoted enough by the people who pay them, a 5K, I think, for the Asus, um, yeah, a couple months ago.

Jason Snell [02:01:51]:
But the question is, but they have to buy it as a Mac display because there are a lot of PC displays out there that are like 5K but they're like 30 inches.

Christina Warren [02:01:59]:
Exactly, right. Well, right, they don't understand. Well, no, this was proper. This was like a proper like 5K 27-inch, like, like Mac display.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
6 best monitors for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

Jason Snell [02:02:09]:
Thank you, uh, ScooterX on Artings.

Christina Warren [02:02:12]:
Artings is good, so maybe, maybe that's the answer. It's good, but the problem is, is that—

Leo Laporte [02:02:16]:
By the way, they liked the Mac, the Studio Display too.

Jason Snell [02:02:19]:
Yeah, that's the problem is that they ended up saying, well, you know, Apple makes this display. You could just use that.

Christina Warren [02:02:24]:
And I'm like, really? Well, okay. So they reviewed the ProArt. That was the one that I was thinking of, the ASUS ProArt display, which is a good price display. The problem with most of these list sites, again, because they're not made by Mac users and Jason knows this far better than I do, it's that we are particular and not all of us But some of us, we have been so ingrained in what Retina means and pixel doubling that we will not, at least my eyes, like I can't look at a non-Apple display, right? There are way better 4K monitors out there that have higher refresh rates and whatnot. That's great for gaming. I can use that with a PC. I wish that Apple supported fractional scaling better as well, but they don't. And so we have 5K and 6K panels are our options in 27 inches and 32 inches.

Christina Warren [02:03:07]:
Those are our options and that's it. And unfortunately then you have like to look through, okay, so who are the main mainstream people making them? I think the good news for, for the people listening to this, uh, or watching this podcast is that the 5K panels, the 6K ones are getting there too, but the 5K panels, uh, the proper like 27-inch 5K panels are finally now, I, I think have hit like the mainstream enough that there are at least 4 main manufacturers to make them.

Jason Snell [02:03:35]:
Them. That panel is ubiquitous at this point, which is, is great because, you know, it's no longer— it was rare when it started in the 5K iMac, but now it's everywhere.

Christina Warren [02:03:44]:
10 years later. Exactly. Now you can finally find a lot of them. We saw that with, um, what was it, I guess the Cinema Display and the Thunderbolt Display. That was a 1440p panel, um, that towards the end of its life you did start to see a lot of them on way cheaper, like, like, like Mono, uh, price or someone had there were a lot of like lower-end, like, I guess Asian manufacturers, I'm not gonna say lower-end, but much cheaper ways that you could get that same panel in a different form factor. We've finally seen that with 5K. 6K is a little more complicated. The panel that Apple used in the Pro Display XDR, RIP, was never replicated.

Christina Warren [02:04:19]:
There was one that Dell used. There's now a different one that LG has. There's one that's slightly different that some other folks use. So there's variance there. But the 5K, if that's what you want, 27 inches, there are options that have options that you can daisy chain, that you can have one, uh, plug in with Thunderbolt, that also have HDMI and DisplayPort.

Jason Snell [02:04:38]:
Imagine, imagine. Yeah, so this RTX story I have read, and the reason that it made me think I wish somebody else would do this is their number one choice is the Studio Display, which, uh, yeah, but also you've given up. Their second choice is a Dell monitor where they say, well, it has has a lower resolution because it's a 4K 27 or whatever. That's not acceptable. That's not a best for a Mac at all, period. Then the ProArt display, which again, I've heard positive things about the ASUS ProArt displays, but like, it's just really disappointing because what nothing says, I don't get it more than, well, why don't you buy this 30-inch 4K display? It's like, no, no, that is not the Retina resolution to which I am accustomed. I'm not interested in that. So yeah, but that you're right.

Jason Snell [02:05:20]:
Right. If you look for, if you look for a 5K 27-inch display, you will find a bunch and they will all be cheaper than the Apple display.

Leo Laporte [02:05:30]:
We are going to have David Pogue on the show March 31st. Yesterday was David's birthday. Today his massive tome came out and one Jason Snells reviewed it on— did— at the Wall Street Journal, Reinvention Incorporated.

Jason Snell [02:05:47]:
You call it? Well, that was the headline. I was surprised as everyone else when I saw the headline to my story. I didn't write a headline or a subhead, but I did write the story.

Leo Laporte [02:05:57]:
The words were never mine. The book is not called that. It's called Apple: The First 50 Years.

Jason Snell [02:06:04]:
Yes. 608 pages. It's big. It's a big one. Like I said, I read it on my vacation. It was a surprise query from the Wall Street Journal. I said yes, and then I read a 500, 600-page book. Book on my vacation, um, beach reading.

Jason Snell [02:06:17]:
It is great.

Leo Laporte [02:06:18]:
Um, it is—

Jason Snell [02:06:18]:
don't get sand in it though.

Leo Laporte [02:06:20]:
It's a, it's a, uh, well, it was a PDF on an iPad, so it was fine. Oh, okay. Um, it looks like the physical book looks like really nice.

Jason Snell [02:06:27]:
Here's the concept. It's a, um, it's a biography of Apple. So many tech stories are either about products or they're about people, and this is about a company. It is about Apple. And for those who do not know, David was a writer, and columnist for Macworld for years. And then he went to the New York Times and was their personal tech columnist. And recently he's been doing, he does PBS Nova stuff. Now he does CBS Sunday Morning stuff.

Jason Snell [02:06:50]:
He had a whole line of books called the Missing Manual books. You may have bought some of them. And now he's got this book. David has a really great, as, as somebody who edited some of his features back at Macworld, really breezy style, really friendly, picks the right level. It's a, it's an easy read. And he very clearly set out to write the definitive history of Apple as a company for 50 years. Um, some of the stories will be familiar. Uh, the, one of the effects that I noticed in the book is that the longer ago it was, the more stories have been collected in various books and interviews over time.

Jason Snell [02:07:21]:
And as you move to the present, when he's talking about the last 10 or 15 years, there's not a lot there. Apple, he tries, but like Apple supplied him with interviews, which is amazing. He said he did. He told me he did like 2 or 3 days of interviews at Apple Park for the book, which is unheard of that Apple would cooperate with something like this. But all those people have media training. All those people are not telling secret stories out of school. They are sticking to the basics. And as a result, like, there's no good dirt from the last 15 years.

Jason Snell [02:07:50]:
There just isn't. I think the high point of the book is the middle, when— which is around the iPhone and the iPod, because those people have all started to retire, started to leave the industry. So there is some good background stuff. Stuff in there where you get to see, like, like Ken Kashenda's book. And Ken Kashenda is in this book talking about making the iPhone keyboard, which is an amazing story. And there's a great story in there about how John Rubinstein and Jeff Williams went to Hitachi and, um, or was it Toshiba? And, and, and they just went there to say hi on a tour of Japan. And they're like, we've got this little hard drive, we don't know what to do with it. And they just look at each other and like, we'll buy all of them.

Jason Snell [02:08:30]:
And that was how the iPod came to be, because— and Apple bought them all, so no one else could even make a music player with that hard drive for some period of time because they bought all of them. David refers to it as a hard drive the size of an Oreo, which is not wrong. Uh, so it, it— yeah, it's a fun book. Um, if you're an Apple fan, you will— you may have heard a lot of these stories before, although I think at this point there are so many people interested in Apple who know it from like the iPhone era forward, that they may be surprised to read about the Apple II and the original Mac and some of those classic stories. So, um, yeah, I, I think it's really good. And I think that now if somebody said, is there a— because there's been so many books about Apple— is there a definitive book? What is the definitive book about the history of Apple? This is the answer. This is the definitive book about the history of Apple, even though In 15 or 20 years, somebody will write a better history of 2010s and 2020s Apple because just those people aren't willing to, to squeal yet. But, uh, but it's really good and really well done and lots of pictures and, uh, and, and some really great stories.

Jason Snell [02:09:40]:
And he did do a bunch of original interviews, not just at Apple Park. He talked to a bunch of the old guard. He said that a bunch of people have died since he interviewed them for the book because he really liked Bill Atkinson. For example. So he's got those voices in the book, which is really great. So yeah, it's a— it's a— for anybody who's watching MacBreak Weekly, you should probably get this book.

Andy Ihnatko [02:09:59]:
I, I hate to make you cringe, Jason, but I also want to really recommend your Wall Street Journal review because it is in and of itself a really nice overview of here's what was going— here's, here's the history of Apple, not within this book, but here is my telling of the history of Apple that I relived by reading this book. Yeah, I thought because I'm a big fan of your writing and I think this is one of the best things you've written. I have a folder on Google Drive of things I enjoyed reading on the web so that I can just simply open up this directory and find great things to read. That was such a quick save because I think it's one of the nicest things you've ever written.

Jason Snell [02:10:36]:
Came out March 6th in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's on their website.

Leo Laporte [02:10:39]:
And if you are an Apple News person, you can get it on Apple News. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And we should mention again that the day before Apple's 50th birthday, David will be joining us.

Jason Snell [02:10:50]:
Amazing. Backbreak Weekly on March 31st. I got to— I talked to— talked to him for about an hour yesterday on his birthday. I didn't even know, uh, that. And that'll be an upgrade this month. He's making the rounds. When I talked to him, he said, yeah, I'm about to leave on a 3-week-long book tour.

Leo Laporte [02:11:04]:
That poor guy, good luck.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:05]:
Exhausted by the time he gets to us. Yeah, he's interviewing Phil Schiller at South by Southwest too. Yes.

Christina Warren [02:11:10]:
Oh, that's— that's gonna be fun. Okay, well, A, that's amazing that Apple is like putting A, meeting somebody at South by Southwest, and, and B, that's a great pairing for both of them, right? For them to promote the 50th anniversary, book promo, you know, talk about other stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:22]:
That's great. He was also on CBS This Morning yesterday with a long interview with, with Tim Cook. And, and was CBS put the extended interview with Tim Cook on there, which is on their YouTube channel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He— it's not as though Tim was like laying bare, like, oh well, here's what we're doing next year and here's what we really screwed up 2 years ago. But I thought it was a more thoughtful version, an introspective version of Tim that we've ever seen. He was not under the usual mode of, I'm— I've got marketing people in a little earpiece in my ear giving me high signs and low signs about what's being asked.

Jason Snell [02:11:53]:
I thought was really good. So funny, I will, I'll tease this from the Upgrade interview, which will be up in a couple of weeks, but I said to David, you know, a couple weeks ago there was this report about how Tim said, yeah, it's our 50th anniversary and we are gonna do some stuff I said, David, you, you went to them with this book and said, I would like to interview a bunch of people because I'm doing this book. And that happened last year, right? Book deadlines, it was working way in advance. Yeah. And he said, he said, yeah. And they, they basically didn't— weren't interested. And then they came back to him and said that they would do it. And I said, do you think you're the one who was like the canary in the coal mine who warned them? And he said, maybe, because that's my theory is David Pogue, middle of last year, maybe beginning of last year, approached Apple and said, your 50th anniversary is in 2026.

Jason Snell [02:12:42]:
I'm writing a giant book. It's going to be 600 pages long. He said he cut, like he had to cut like a third of it. They don't make books that big anymore. It's still huge. And I think they went, oh no, what are we going to do? It is our 50th anniversary next year. He's only the first person to ask. More people are going to keep asking and it's going to rise to a crescendo in March of 2026.

Jason Snell [02:13:07]:
What's our strategy? And I think David kind of created his access by reminding them that they needed to have a strategy for the 50th anniversary. And that when they decided that they would, one of the things they agreed to do is furnish some people to talk to David, which is great. But like, I think, I really believe that David Pogue is the one who reminded Apple, hey, Hey, next year everybody's going to want to talk about the 50th anniversary of Apple, right?

Christina Warren [02:13:34]:
No, I would totally believe you. And I would think that because typically Apple is kind of adverse about celebrating, you know, anniversaries and things like that, 20th anniversary of Macintosh notwithstanding, like they don't tend to make a big deal about that. But if someone like David Pogue, who even if he doesn't have, you know, based on your review, you know, access for whatever reasons, more of the, you know, modern, like last like 10, 15 years. Of folks, goes back so far with people at Apple. And people know him. People who know know David Pogue as a Mac guy first and foremost, right? For sure. So if he's going to approach you and kind of bring this up, you might be thinking, OK, we probably do need to do something about this because 50 years is a big deal. And if we do want to partner with anyone, this is the person that we should cede executives to.

Christina Warren [02:14:20]:
And help, you know, like, yeah, tell part of the story at our archive, which they did apparently. Well, that's amazing in and of itself. Um, my book is not here yet. It arrives sometime today, but, uh, it— I, I'm gonna have to have help like carrying it upstairs because it's so heavy.

Leo Laporte [02:14:39]:
Yeah, 600 pages.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:39]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:14:40]:
I, I don't know if I can get David to bring his, uh, keyboard with him. It'd be great if he could play some of those wonderful songs that he writes.

Jason Snell [02:14:49]:
He was a Broadway a pianist, a musician in the Broadway pits, uh, and, uh, kind of—

Leo Laporte [02:14:57]:
and Stephen Sondheim's personal Mac advisor. Exactly. Sondheim said, hey David, help me, this Mac thing, help me figure it out. Yeah. And, uh, it all started there. It'll be a lot of fun to talk to Dave, um, on March 31st.

Jason Snell [02:15:10]:
That'll be our—

Leo Laporte [02:15:11]:
that's our big blowout 50th anniversary spectacular.

Jason Snell [02:15:16]:
Oh my gosh, 50th anniversary show.

Christina Warren [02:15:19]:
Oh man, black tie for sure, for sure. We all got to come in and our Apple best or rainbow black tie or whatever. Actually, rainbow tie is probably, probably the right way to do it.

Leo Laporte [02:15:29]:
Yeah, rainbow tie. Okay, can it— does it have to spin? Uh, we're gonna take a break and come back. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Our picks of the week coming up, uh, next. So glad to have Christina Warren with us, uh, Mr. Andy Inaco and Mr. Snell, who is the founder of SixColors.com and has been writing about Apple since Wall Street Journal biography.

Jason Snell [02:15:54]:
I like it that they call you Mr. Snell. I had to call him Mr. Pogue throughout too.

Leo Laporte [02:15:59]:
It's a style thing. I love it. It's like the New York Times. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's, uh, get the picks of the week here.

Christina Warren [02:16:06]:
You want to start us off, Christina Warren? Sure will. Okay, so this is actually a fun little game that my friend Keith created. Keith is somebody who I used to work with, and he now works at Mozilla. He created a game called What's My JND, which means basically, it's just necessary difference.

Leo Laporte [02:16:32]:
Basically, when you're doing—

Christina Warren [02:16:33]:
Just noticeable.

Leo Laporte [02:16:34]:
Just noticeable.

Christina Warren [02:16:34]:
Just noticeable difference. Sorry about that. Just noticeable difference. And so the idea is that when you're doing things for color theory with CSS, he has a whole great blog post about it. You need to figure out how— what level— there's a difference between colors. So to kind of showcase this, he created this game. And basically, it actually works really well on Apple displays, I have to say.

Leo Laporte [02:16:55]:
I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. Am I supposed to click where the color changes?

Christina Warren [02:16:56]:
Exactly. Yes. OK. And as you get further in, there are 40 rounds, it gets harder. Harder and harder and harder. And I think that I have the best, uh, ratio so far, which is 0.0018. Um, and I think that's, uh, it's— it— anything, um, under, uh, 0.003 is usually like what they say is, is kind of like the, the way that it can go. Um, the brighter your display is, the better the panel uniformity it is, is going to make this better.

Christina Warren [02:17:26]:
But this is just a fun game. The blog, um, Jason would be very bad at this is what Well, it might be. Well, actually, this is an interesting thing to see. I would be curious to know how, how this is with colorblind, um, stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:17:37]:
Um, and, and that's the thing that, uh, actually Keith maybe should like make a colorblind—

Christina Warren [02:17:43]:
why is this important in browsers? Well, part of it actually is— well, part of it is actually accessibility, right? So the idea is, is making sure that, that, that, yeah, if your colors are too similar, you can't— aren't differentiating enough. Um, and then part of it 2 is like figuring out, okay, when do I need, how, like what level of, um, I guess, uh, dithering and like other sorts of stuff do I need to do in my, in my design with my CSS? Like how deep do I need to go on a color profile, um, for these things?

Leo Laporte [02:18:11]:
Because the issue is web browsers don't display colors accurately across all their different systems. I should probably not be using Firefox.

Christina Warren [02:18:18]:
Oh no, he works for Firefox. Oh no, he works for Firefox. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so So that's kind of part of what he talks about in his article, which is linked on the main page of the game, is that it kind of talks about, which is called too much color. He's like, how do you tell if two colors look the same? And it turns out there's a way that you can figure that out. And what do you do with this? What are the levels looking like? What optimal process do you need to apply? And why do you need to do this? Because your browser doesn't. So anyway, it's a good read. But the reading aside and the nerdiness aside, the game is just really fun to see how—

Leo Laporte [02:18:55]:
It's really hard.

Christina Warren [02:18:56]:
I'm not even halfway through. Well, that's what I'm saying. Right. And I can see yours. I can see where the line is right now. But you can see it? Oh, yeah. I can see it. Yeah.

Christina Warren [02:19:05]:
But the problem is if you stare at it too long, if you're going through— because again, it's 40 rounds— at least I did.

Leo Laporte [02:19:10]:
I had to blink multiple times. Yeah.

Christina Warren [02:19:14]:
This one, I have no idea. Because your eyes just, just get kind of blurred with it. But anyway, Keith, uh, Keith released this in his blog post today, but, uh, he showed us some of us yesterday, and I probably spent like 45 minutes playing with it.

Leo Laporte [02:19:26]:
So I was like, I want to share this because this is just a really addictive, fun game. Okay, okay. And you can find it at— well, you'll just have to go to MacBreak Weekly Picks or something.

Jason Snell [02:19:43]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [02:19:43]:
Or co.uk/what's-my-jnd. Just, just, just, uh, Google what's my JND. And, uh, yeah, there you go. Okay, I'll see if he—

Leo Laporte [02:19:49]:
he should probably come up with a better URL than that, but yeah, just, just Google What's My Jandy.

Andy Ihnatko [02:19:56]:
Andy has a book to pick. Yes, my next read is definitely going to be, uh, Polk's History of Apple, but there's another 500-page incredibly important tome about the history of the past several decades. It is, of course, Liza Minnelli's memoir Kids Wait Till You Hear This, 448 pages, released today. I'm excited about it chiefly because there's been some excerpts on People magazine. And is she still with us?

Christina Warren [02:20:20]:
Yes, still with us. Okay, she's outlived so many people, it's amazing. Like, there's a whole website about who Liza's outlived.

Leo Laporte [02:20:25]:
It's great. She was great in Arrested Development, but that's the last time I saw her.

Andy Ihnatko [02:20:30]:
It's great. And so apparently he's been her best friend of— has told Michael Feinstein. So basically she's been talking— he started collecting her like stories for like the past 10 years with the intention of eventually doing a book. When, when I say that the one that the first, the first passage that I read in the excerpt from People magazine was her telling this story about the time she was with her walking in New York City with her husband and Martin Scorsese started laying into her because he did, because Liza did not show up for a date that they had.

Leo Laporte [02:21:03]:
And she ends the story by saying, she was in his movie New York, New York with Robert De Niro.

Andy Ihnatko [02:21:08]:
Yeah, exactly. So basically there are at least two stories involved. I was with my husband and there was a, and what my boyfriend caught us. And I, and I also engaged to another person at that same time. And I'm like, oh my God, beach, beach weather cannot come early enough. I need this in hardcover because I'm going to read this at the beach.

Leo Laporte [02:21:28]:
Although if you married Liza Minnelli, you probably have some idea.

Andy Ihnatko [02:21:31]:
You figure out that, you know, this is an e-ticket.

Jason Snell [02:21:33]:
Ride.

Andy Ihnatko [02:21:34]:
This is a dark ride. Make sure that your— the harness is like fully, fully locked in before the ride goes into motion.

Jason Snell [02:21:40]:
Wow.

Andy Ihnatko [02:21:41]:
I feel as though this is not a memoir that's going to underdeliver in any way, shape, or form.

Leo Laporte [02:21:48]:
Yes, yes. Very good. Good pick. Liza Minnelli's new book comes out today, and it—

Andy Ihnatko [02:21:53]:
what's the name of it again? Kids, wait till you hear this. I want to do the voice, but I can't do the voice.

Jason Snell [02:21:59]:
Liza.

Leo Laporte [02:21:59]:
That's Liza with a Z, not Liza with an S, just so you know. Just so you know.

Jason Snell [02:22:05]:
Mr. Jason Snell, your pick of the week. Well, I've got a little bonus pick, which is eat your citrus. It's good for you. Vitamins, lemons and limes. Very good. I've got an orange and a lemon in my hands for the video people. Ah, the smell of it.

Jason Snell [02:22:18]:
This is my photogenic lemon that I used in that video.

Leo Laporte [02:22:21]:
That's the original.

Jason Snell [02:22:22]:
Oh, you could auction that off. So, uh, Quinn Nelson, who is a YouTuber behind Snazzy Labs— it is a great— he's a great guy and it's a great channel you should subscribe to. And he's a, he's a longtime Apple person. He, he is critical and skeptical and all those things, but he also gets us because he's one of us. He has started a side business called Copeland Supply, and that reference is intentional. If you know, you know. And he's released a bunch of things. He made these custom Cherry-compatible keycaps that you can buy that are like little tiny iMacs.

Jason Snell [02:22:57]:
G3 iMacs in all the different colors that are amazing. But the pick I'm going to make, because remember there was that whole thing about how Apple started to sell a polishing cloth.

Leo Laporte [02:23:06]:
They still do. And they still do.

Jason Snell [02:23:08]:
And they update its compatibility every time a new product comes out. Well, Quinn was like, you know, I bet I could make one bigger and cheaper. And that's why he created for $18 the Cloth Pro Max, which I have here with me. Nice. It is a beautiful polishing cloth for your devices. It's $18. He worked— Quinn is a very smart man and he sweats the details, um, and all of these products. And as I have a bunch of friends who have gone from being computer nerds to having to build physical products, it's so hard when there are atoms involved, people.

Jason Snell [02:23:42]:
It's so hard, but he did it. And Cloth Pro Max, it's really nice. So this is like my big go-to, clean that Studio Display, whatever you need to do.. But I also just recommend going to copeland.supply because you will see the keycaps and the other stuff that he sells there. But my pick, yeah, I'm doing it.

Andy Ihnatko [02:24:03]:
$18 Cloth Pro Max from Copeland Supply. Jason, I just, I do need to ask, is the side of the cloth you don't see just as nice as the side of the cloth that you actually polish with?

Jason Snell [02:24:12]:
No matter how you fold it, Andy, it's always a good side. There you go.

Leo Laporte [02:24:16]:
Yeah, that's my endorsement of the Cloth Pro Max. For those of us who've been around long enough to remember Bill Atkinson's amazing HyperCard may remember some of the art bits that came with HyperCard. Well, now the art bits can once again be yours. All of them collected and downloadable, suitable for, I don't know, your notes, anything. These are, I don't know if Susan Kare did these, probably, it looks like her style. These are beautiful pixel art.

Christina Warren [02:24:51]:
They're not icons, they're graphics.

Leo Laporte [02:24:52]:
They're not— it's like clipart, kind of. Kind of like clipart. Yeah, we remember clipart.

Jason Snell [02:24:56]:
Yeah, look at this.

Andy Ihnatko [02:24:56]:
And a lot of these are hand-drawn. Like, some of these are clearly like early, early, early stage scanning when scanners cost $80,000, but cleaned up. But a lot of them are people just basically placing pixels where they need to be and removing them from where they should be. Look at this one. God, I still— give me flashbacks to like just, just as a source of free clip art, HyperCard was a major release for a lot of people.

Christina Warren [02:25:19]:
Well, now honestly, that was my first introduction to it in elementary school in the '90s, was that it was like a place that you could, you know, get, uh, I guess by that point it was in color.

Leo Laporte [02:25:29]:
But yeah, this is, this is wild. There are some color ones, uh, in here as well. Uh, ArtBits from HyperCard. It's It's in the website, which even the website is kind of looks archives.somnolent.net. I don't know how I found this, but I just thought this was really cool from the junk pile.

Andy Ihnatko [02:25:56]:
I love low-resolution handmade pixel art. Even modern stuff where it's like color pixel art. There's just a vibe to it and an intention that I love.

Jason Snell [02:26:03]:
Yeah, 700.

Leo Laporte [02:26:03]:
I'm feeling a lot of things right now. I don't know. 700 things. They are pings, so you can download them and use them. They're even transparent. That's it for MacBreak Weekly for this fine day. Thanks again to Michael Sargent for running the show last week. I'm sorry I missed it, but I'm glad I'm here this week.

Leo Laporte [02:26:23]:
I'll be back next week, and I think I'm gonna miss another one. And Jason, you're gonna miss one towards, but you're gonna be here for David's interview on the end of the month, I think. I believe I am, yes. I hope so.

Jason Snell [02:26:33]:
Yeah, I think I'm gonna miss the week before the 24th. I've got a spring break trip there, but I don't know. I think, I think I'm on, I think I'm on now for a while. I think I, I think I have passed my weird time in my life. Uh, and that's good. Now I can just settle in and be— this has been a, it's been a weird 2026, man. Let me tell you more on that later. As the other weird thing, Wall Street Journal is but one of the weird things that happened to me, uh, that have set up things.

Jason Snell [02:27:03]:
But I think I'm here for the duration now.

Leo Laporte [02:27:05]:
So this should be good. Well, that's awesome. That's a great byline to have. Christina Warren, wonderful to have you. She is a developer relations queen at GitHub, @filmgirl, film_girl everywhere else. Wonderful to see you again. Glad your health is good and you're feeling fine.

Christina Warren [02:27:23]:
And put some batteries in that Teddy Ruxpin. And I know I, I, I, that, that's gonna have to be a DIY project or something to try to, try to, try to— oh my gosh, I should like totally make it one of those creepy LLM toys that they were selling.

Leo Laporte [02:27:36]:
I should totally like do that.

Christina Warren [02:27:38]:
But like, you know, you should try drinking cyanide. Exactly, exactly. That would actually be a funny—

Leo Laporte [02:27:43]:
that would actually be a fun DIY project. I like it. Andy Ihnatko, from the home of Andy Ihnatko. Uh, thank you so much, my friend. Great to see you. Cheers to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twit members making this show possible. twit.tv/clubtwit.

Leo Laporte [02:27:58]:
If you're not a member, we want you, we need you, we want you. Uh, we do the show every Tuesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern. Uh, we have gone to summertime, so it's now 1800 UTC. Uh, you will find us live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick, and of course in the Club Twit Discord. But after the fact, you can also find us on YouTube YouTube. There's video there, great for sharing clips of the show with friends if you want to do that. We also, of course, have shows at our website, audio and video, twit.tv/mbw. Best thing though, subscribe in your favorite podcast client.

Leo Laporte [02:28:36]:
That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you can, leave us a good review. Give us a 5-star review. Help spread the word about the nation's premier Vision Pro podcast, now with less Vision Pro.

Andy Ihnatko [02:28:51]:
We didn't have anything this week. Nothing at all.

Christina Warren [02:28:55]:
Sorry.

Andy Ihnatko [02:28:55]:
It only underscores our integrity to the quality—maintain the quality of this feature that we do not speak if there's nothing to say. If there's nothing to say. 

Leo Laporte [02:28:58]:
Speaks well of us. Thank you everybody for joining us. Have a great week. We'll see you next week. And now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.