MacBreak Weekly 1025 Transcript
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Christina and Jason are here. We're just coming off of Google I O. What will their reaction be to all the AI announcements from Google? More importantly, what's Apple going to do in a couple of weeks at WWDC? Does the strategy change? Let's talk about it next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Week Weekly Episode 1025, recorded Tuesday, May 19, 2026: Below the Plimsoll Line. This is MacBreak Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:00:43]:
Time to talk all the Apple news. Jason Snell is here from sixcolors.com we're starting late. Thank you for your patience, Jason.
Jason Snell [00:00:51]:
It's, you know, it's always on time when it's podcast time.
Leo Laporte [00:00:55]:
Podcast clock. Using the podcast clock. Andy Ihnatko also here. Like us, I'm sure you were watching the Google I O keynote, which is, I think, a preview of what we're going to see in a couple of weeks from Apple, but we'll find out. Also with us, Christina Warren, developer relations at GitHub. Hello, film girl.
Christina Warren [00:01:16]:
Hello.
Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
Did you watch? I imagine you did. Your old boss was on stage there.
Christina Warren [00:01:21]:
He was. He was a lot of my old team. It was exciting to see all the stuff that they announced and good for them. Right. Is a good event, I feel like.
Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Yeah. So I guess we could kick off with that a little bit. I mean, we're going to be talking about how this will affect Siri on the iPhone because as we know, Apple's going to use Gemini for Siri. So they announced a new Gemini model, which I presume Apple will get. This is all, you know, it's going to be really interesting to see what Apple says on June 8th at WWDC.
Andy Ihnatko [00:01:53]:
Yeah. Especially since a lot of the stuff that they showed off today, I wouldn't say steps on the toes of a lot of the rumors that we've been hearing about iOS27, but lends credence to the stuff we've been talking about for a while now, which is like if whatever AI that you subscribe to at 20 bucks a month is doing the stuff where you say, hey, whoever it is, prepare me for this meeting and make sure you get the latest data and create a table that we can send to everyone who's going in there and do that 20 minutes before the meeting starts and it can make that happen, nobody's going to care whether that happens off of an Apple logo or a Google logo, as they're not the ones who have to pay for the tokens to make it happen.
Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Well, that was kind of my reaction to this is, you know, this would work just as well on an iPhone. And they made a point somewhere else. You don't really need to have a special Siri to do this.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:43]:
Although it's, I mean, the failure, not failure. But the difference is that as always, every demo that they showed off, and they showed off a lot of really impressive actual Live Fire working stuff, but all of it assumes that. What is your inbox? Well, it's great if it's going to be Gmail. Okay, where are all your files and documents? Be great if it's Google Drive and Google Workspace. Whereas I'm looking forward to seeing Apple basically say that no, if you've got a file anywhere on your desktop or in your cloud, we'll make it work. Which is not to say that won't be true still with Google, because there's some hooks that are in the Macintosh app for Gemini that are forward looking, but that's always going to be something that Apple is going to be able to play that Google and other fighters are going to have a harder time doing.
Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
I think Google's taking a page actually from Apple's Playbook. This is the ecosystem play they really make. It makes you want to live in la vida Google, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. And the more you use Google. So they announced a new model that they say Gemini Flash 3.5 is as good as Gemini 3.1 Pro for less cost. And presumably there'll be a 3.5 Pro. But they also announced an agentic version of this called Spark. That's kind of interesting because agents are the hot thing with openclaw and so forth.
Leo Laporte [00:04:07]:
They're modifying Anti Gravity, their IDE to have a command line interface like Claude Cohn and OpenAI's codecs. They're going to have sub agents, they're going to have agentic. And what's really interesting, they're adding this kind of agentic capability to their search. And yes, it all works better if you use Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Address Book and Google Drive.
Andy Ihnatko [00:04:32]:
Yeah, but did the search demo scare you the way that it did me? A little bit. On one level it was really, really impressive, especially since they picked up on something that they kind of slipped under the table last week during the Android event about talking about basically generative user interfaces. Basically that we're going to whatever it is, the task that's before you or the requests you've made, we can create an actual interactive user interface that's exact for that. And one of the interesting examples they came up with is that if you want a desktop widget for your phone, for your watch, for whatever, just describe what the widget should do. We will build that widget for you. That was super interesting. But the
Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
I wonder how much of this is going to end up in Siri. That's the real question, right?
Andy Ihnatko [00:05:18]:
Just to complete the thought, I'm sorry, it made me wonder if you're going to be generating those kind of user interfaces. Like, I'm not just going to give you the raw data, I'm going to interpret it a couple of different ways through a couple different filters. We will give you this wonderful interactive model of physics that you can play with and learn the answer to your question, but it's not giving you directly the answer to the question from a human being who actually published a paper on this, which is another level of okay, can I trust that this little gizmo that you've given me to teach me is actually accurate? And as always, these are great demos, but it has to work every time you try it. Google gave a big thing a few months ago about, hey, wow, now like Agentic Chrome, now Chrome can do things like fill out forms for you. And I'm like, well, it's great because every week I fill out the exact same form to reserve this exact same conference room. It's a simple basic like HTML form which label it, what is your name? It knows my name, what is my email address, what is my grade, the thing that I use every single week. It should be able to figure that out. And it didn't work.
Andy Ihnatko [00:06:23]:
It had to like say, well, gee, I can't figure that out. But once you walk me through this, like, no, I don't want you to. And I never, I haven't been trying it again. It has to work. If it doesn't work, you will lose the first time that they try it and then they won't keep trying it until a couple of years have passed. And now you are using the Apple thing because the Apple thing was six months later than yours. But it did work.
Leo Laporte [00:06:43]:
Jason, if, if Apple adapts or adopts Gemini to Siri, will they be able to make the same ecosystem promises that Google is? In other words, will they use icloud and Apple Mail? Will that be as good?
Jason Snell [00:06:58]:
I mean, that's the question. Ideally they'd be using on device connected data, so it wouldn't be using icloud mail, but it would probably be using whatever email was attached to Apple Mail and whatever Calendar.
Leo Laporte [00:07:16]:
Apple Calendar. If it's the Google Calendar that's syncing, then it's fine.
Jason Snell [00:07:20]:
Right, Exactly. So I think, you know, I think that's the idea. The question is like do they let third party email or Calendar apps into the party? Or you're gonna have to re. Add all your data in the first party app just to get it to, to look at it and all that. But that's my guess is that it won't be because Google is all about its services. Right. Whereas Apple is all about kind of the apps running on its devices. So it would be whatever you connect.
Jason Snell [00:07:43]:
I think, I think it's funny because I'm connected to Google Calendar and Gmail. So in my case it would need to talk to Google. But I. From Apple's perspective, it's more like we'll look at whatever email you have attached to Apple Mail or your default email client, depending on how they do it.
Leo Laporte [00:08:00]:
Remember that Google or sorry, Apple kind of blocked AI apps? AI developed apps in the App Store, right?
Christina Warren [00:08:10]:
Well, they blocked the ability to use an app to build another mobile app from the App Store.
Jason Snell [00:08:17]:
There's nothing, there's lots of bytecoded apps in there.
Christina Warren [00:08:20]:
I was going to say there are many tell but they blocked rep doll
Leo Laporte [00:08:25]:
it, for instance, which by the way, they've made a deal now and it's back. Yeah, but they were nervous about it. Seems to me what Apple's saying is I'm a little nervous about the idea of for instance, Gemini creating an app on your phone. You know, for you it's kind of what Google's offering though is these, these widgets and so forth. I don't know what will it look like on an iPhone to have this? I mean, it's interesting because Google's only desktop app is on Mac. They don't have one for Windows.
Andy Ihnatko [00:08:56]:
Yeah, I think it was a technicality on banning. Excuse me. They cited the rule about, no, you can't have an app that basically once we've approved your app, you cannot then push out another version of that app that fundamentally changes what that app does without going through another approval process. I think that they said that because you're basically creating an app that can create other code and create features that have not been approved by the App Store's approval process on that technicality. We are basically saying you have to fix this.
Leo Laporte [00:09:25]:
Will they do that to Google Search?
Andy Ihnatko [00:09:28]:
Don't know. I'm not, not. Well, they can't do it to Google Search because again, they don't Control the
Leo Laporte [00:09:32]:
browser, but Google doesn't control the browser,
Andy Ihnatko [00:09:36]:
you're saying, I'm sorry, whatever. Google. Google is putting this inside a browser container, which Apple doesn't, doesn't control. Not have a problem with that. But yeah, that's. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the, the biggest, the biggest fun you can have is when you're actually creating things that live inside your phone. There's a rumor, I think, from, from Gurman, that iOS27, that's one of the things that, that one, the one that.
Andy Ihnatko [00:09:58]:
One of the most interesting features of Siri is going to be that you can simply ask Siri to create a shortcut for you and we'll build the shortcut for you. That's the sort of stuff that Apple's probably going to want to reserve for itself.
Leo Laporte [00:10:09]:
And even she was a little perturbed by that notion, I think.
Christina Warren [00:10:15]:
But it's the and should be expected thing, period. Right? I mean, honestly, like the fact that, that I'm going to criticize shortcuts here because I do like it and I use it a lot, but I was actually struggling with this yesterday. I was, as I was building a shortcut out and I went, this is the worst freaking language ever to exist. It's awful. The fact that it doesn't compile down to an actual language, so you can't even see the actual code to then write it in something that is not their terrible interface. I mean, honestly, it's the sort of thing that was built for, for AI, Right? Like, if Siri can be trusted to
Leo Laporte [00:10:46]:
create those things, can your AI create a shortcut now?
Christina Warren [00:10:50]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:10:50]:
My. Paste this into shortcuts.
Jason Snell [00:10:53]:
Federico. You talk about Federico Vitici. He's, he's talked about it, and I believe that, that, that there will be more on this later this week on Mac Stories that he has built a tool that will use Codex or Google code or Codex or Claude code, and it will generate shortcuts.
Leo Laporte [00:11:11]:
That would be nice.
Christina Warren [00:11:12]:
Yeah, that would be nice. And I.
Jason Snell [00:11:14]:
And I think it's. I think. I think he's doing it now because he's been working on a long time and he's proved that it's possible. But I think he also is doing it now, anticipating that Apple will probably be Sherlocked. You can, you can do this yourself. And we don't need Federico anymore.
Christina Warren [00:11:28]:
Yeah, well, and I'm sure that whatever he's building is far more advanced than what I've done, but I've done the similar thing which I assume his is his approach was similar to mine, which was to kind of create like a compiler of sorts of basically letting it create something that is able to be generated to then be able to be imported into shortcuts the right way.
Leo Laporte [00:11:48]:
Is it like a. So shortcuts will let you import some form of.
Jason Snell [00:11:51]:
There is an import format. You can have a shortcuts file. It's. They don't want you to see it.
Christina Warren [00:11:57]:
They don't want you to see it. It's hard to do. But I actually, I was playing around with, with the various services, like various models actually yesterday, looking to see where we were on that, and I was. I got back something and I was able to kind of configure my own. I'm sure that whatever he releases will be better. But no, I mean, Apple's. Obviously this is a very obvious way for AI to go. Assuming that this theory can be relied on to be like, okay, I can actually use actual human language to have it create the shortcut I want rather than going through the arduous process that exists now.
Christina Warren [00:12:29]:
I think my bigger question about the Google stuff, because obviously what they're going to show off at I O, as you pointed out, is all about their ecosystem and everything that's within their world and their purview. Apple, I don't know exactly, exactly what access they're getting to everything they're getting the models, but there's no guarantee that all these other features are going to be things that Apple will just be able to integrate into iOS or into Siri or anything else. Right. So I think that. And I'd be very surprised if Google would just let them have access to all that stuff without any of the work. I feel like there's going to have to be a lot of work on Apple side to then say, okay, well we have access to this model and we can have it talk to the local data. To Jason's point about, however, you'll get account information in and talk to the cloud and maybe do some on device stuff. I guess it'll depend.
Christina Warren [00:13:18]:
But it'll be largely up to Apple to build any of the tooling and to use the model to do what it wants to do. Whereas I think Google is making a very clear play to say, yeah, if you stay in our ecosystem, you can do all these wonderful things on our services and those services might include our iOS apps. Right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it includes the core iOS stuff. Just because Gemini is going to be powering Siri doesn't mean that everything else that Google is bringing to that broader ecosystem is stuff that Apple will be able to get.
Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
I guess that's kind of what I'm asking is, is there now a tension between these partners?
Christina Warren [00:13:57]:
Of course, there's always been a tension. I mean, there used to be a
Leo Laporte [00:14:01]:
lot of tension under Steve Jobs. Remember he sued.
Christina Warren [00:14:04]:
Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's
Leo Laporte [00:14:06]:
always been tension, frenemies, more lately.
Christina Warren [00:14:08]:
Well, yeah, I'm sure. Look, big companies work. At least my experience, you have lots of different divisions of people who make different deals for different reasons. And you have some groups of people that are going to be very upset by how those partnerships work. And you have other teams that are going to be very happy that those partnerships exist because they hit different revenue parts of the business and different people get happy about those things. But no, I mean, I think that this has always been a we need to rely on your technology standpoint. But it's always been a little bit of an awkward situation. And this is true for a lot of companies that Apple has relationships with.
Christina Warren [00:14:40]:
Right. You know, have had partnerships with Amazon in the cloud and Microsoft even going back a decade and they've done some Google Cloud too. And I'm sure that, you know, they have the Google search deal. I'm sure that Google doesn't love that a huge amount of their search revenue is, you know, incumbent upon, you know, being the default provider on iPhone at the same time that's also, you know, $20 billion or whatever that they pay Apple because they get more than that, you know, in aggregate. So I think there's always going to be tension between those things and just comes down to where are those swim lanes and what do you do to differentiate? And I think that this is even more increasingly an opportunity, ironically I think for Google to kind of show we have models that other people can use to build their own ecosystems, but we have our own ecosystem too. And that's, that's a challenge.
Leo Laporte [00:15:31]:
Mark Gurman had a big leak yesterday and I'm kind of thinking maybe this was planted the day before Google I o to reassure the Apple faithful. He says besides having a grammar checker, company's testing a new write with Siri toggle at the top of the keyboard as well as a help me write option. But this is the key the iPhone maker. This is yesterday in Bloomberg. The iPhone maker is additionally preparing an upgraded version of shortcuts. It's apt for creating time savers such as for sharing calendar availability and summarizing a PDF or automations like opening the garage door, turning on the Lights. The version now in testing lets users create shortcuts simply by describing what they want them to do. A prompt, in other words.
Leo Laporte [00:16:13]:
Yeah. In the updated app, users are presented with a prompt asking what do you want your shortcut to do? Along with a text field to describe the request. The system then automatically builds and installs the shortcut on the device.
Jason Snell [00:16:25]:
Gurman reported a version of this a couple years ago that this was in development. I think it was more in the context of the Vision Pro, but it leads to the same place. I don't think this was a chosen planned leak. If anything, it might have been timed by Gurman to have it be like, here's your answer already about some of the stuff that he knows that Apple is doing.
Christina Warren [00:16:43]:
I don't know.
Jason Snell [00:16:44]:
I mean you never know with big companies, but Apple is kind of a customer of, of Google and Gemini. And so if the people who are supplying the Gemini tech to Apple view them that way, then I don't, I don't know how awkward it actually has to get. I think more of the concern is like what's the lag? Like because with AI, like how. What is their plan not just for WWDC and for shipping iOS 26 or 27 in the fall, but like as the models progress, when does Apple get access to that model? Is there or a model based on the new model? And, and that's the stuff that they presumably been talking about. I'd actually be surprised if Apple, if the people working with Gemini at Apple were surprised by anything that Google said because they're their customer and their supplier and they obviously are planning to be supplied with future Gemini models as a part of their development process. So I think this might not be too much of a shocker. The challenge though is that Gemini isn't just like one thing. And what's really going on is there's the Gemini at the core, that's the model and then there's all the connections you make to control apps and everything else in the os.
Jason Snell [00:17:59]:
And that line is the difference between Google builds it and Apple builds it. Right. Like Apple has to build the connectivity in iOS. Google's just supplying them with that model. And that model will have capabilities, but, but Apple will have to implement it for their customers, just like Google is for, for their customers. It's not a monolith. So I would imagine that they actually talk a lot, but that, that doesn't necessarily affect the outcome of like what Apple. Apple's vision for how this stuff gets implemented in an iOS context might be Very different than Google's vision for Android.
Andy Ihnatko [00:18:28]:
Yeah, and also a lot of the stuff, particularly the stuff that they showed off today is not on, A lot of the stuff is on device stuff. They made a big deal of how they've got their Nano models, the stuff that's going to run locally on device, but they're also leveraging the idea that, look, you don't have to keep your laptop on while it's working on this, this agentic stuff. We will actually create an instance for you in the cloud so it'll be running in the background. And also it means that you can start something on your laptop and then have the widget appear or have the solutions appear to you on your phone or on your watch like much, much later. So that, so ob. It's not something that it's, it's not something that by virtue of the fact that there is common DNA between Apple's AI model and Gemini that all these features are going to go across. I mean this, we, there's still so much we don't know about what the, what the limitations of that deal are. Mostly we've, it's been described in terms of.
Andy Ihnatko [00:19:17]:
No, it's not as though we're, it's not as though Apple is buying a shrink wrap copy of Gemini and installing the CD and, and using Gemini as their AI model. More, more like this is a company that has built this wonderful model. We want to use this as the basis of our brand new model while we build our own foundation model. So yeah, there's still a lot up in the air about a lot of stuff that they were talking about today at Google was simply the difference between Gemini 3 and 3.5 and the leaps that they're making there and also the leaps that they intend to be making towards AGI in the near future. So yeah, these are all very, very relevant questions. Will Apple benefit from access to that DNA or is it. No, you, you, you, you bought like the four cylinder grocery getter car engine. We have this 12 cylinder, 12 cent or supercharged turbocharged one for aircraft.
Andy Ihnatko [00:20:13]:
You don't get that because you didn't actually buy that or you didn't. That's not the engine you wanted us to build for you.
Leo Laporte [00:20:20]:
So. All right, so I'm just, I feel like that Google today showed stuff that is completely independent of either Android or iOS or any operating system that really incense you to just live in the app or the browser. Right. Just not leave everything you want to do, including shop by the way you do in that window and that's what I mean by la vida, Google, you don't need anything else.
Andy Ihnatko [00:20:51]:
Yeah. The flip side of that though is that it means that if you have a, if you have any machine with a decently modern browser, you can have access to all of this stuff. Remember that this is another big difference between Apple and Google. Like was showed off again last week at the Android show where Google said, oh wow, here's this wonderful Gemini intelligence and look how wonderful your phone will be. And then in the small print it's like, yeah, if you bought a phone like 12 months ago, it's not going to work on your phone. It's only going to be like you got to buy a phone this year or next year for it to work. Whereas we can pretty much count on Apple creating features that are going to be as device agnostic as possible. So there's the flip at this, the traditional flip of the coin where Google is trying to, when it comes to software, they try to make stuff that is on as many platforms as possible because so long as more people are using something that Google has touched, they become more valuable property to Google.
Andy Ihnatko [00:21:49]:
So it's very much in their best interest to make sure that they've got ecumenical services, which is great because we don't want to have this sort of AI divide where there are people in the room who can't afford to have their own Apple Mac mini running openclaw. They have to basically grind through their inbox all by themselves. These people should have access to these same sort of productivity tools. They can compete on the same level, but it's okay so long as it works for everybody. It's bad when it becomes a divide between, I'm sorry, you don't have a phone that will run this sort of stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
Ah, it's very interesting. I'm just really curious how Apple's going to spin what Google did today.
Jason Snell [00:22:34]:
Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:22:34]:
Are they going to modify the key, the keynote in the few weeks? Basically not, not change it all the way. But they have to address.
Jason Snell [00:22:40]:
Do you think Google, I assume they know because they're the supplier, they're the client and they're supplying this, that they know at least broadly what Google's doing. But is Apple capable of building on this stuff yet or is it like in process and Apple will get it later? And there's all that mystery. I think how Apple sells all of this is fascinating and a point we've made here before. The Apple Google relationship thus far has been defined by like two sentences that were released jointly by Apple and Google and have been occasionally repeated by that's right, executives word for verbatim.
Leo Laporte [00:23:15]:
Right now I'm thinking there's.
Jason Snell [00:23:17]:
So we don't know anything more than that now. So they have to say what it is.
Leo Laporte [00:23:20]:
They're being cagey, in other words.
Christina Warren [00:23:22]:
Well, I mean, in a mine also, just be as matters. Look, there's a lot of things that I can't say, but what I can say is, and I don't know how much they knew about what was going to be announced at IO or not. I'm sure that they're broadly familiar with the capabilities of the models. I also feel confident that they have looked at other past relationships that companies have signed with model providers and didn't just lock themselves into one version and whatnot and probably had a clause that said and all subsequent types of models going up to a certain amount will be accessible to us. So I'm not going to pretend like I know what features they had access to and what they don't, but I will say it, that these things change relatively quickly and the partners often don't get a ton of advance notice about what the capabilities will be when they come out and what they can build on with those things. Apple might get more than others. I don't know. I don't know if there's any reason why they necessarily would unless that the money that they were getting paid was so significant.
Christina Warren [00:24:16]:
I don't know if that would be any different from anyone else. But I mean, I don't know what this, this changes again. This is, is Google's implementation of their models and their ecosystem and whatever Apple
Leo Laporte [00:24:28]:
things that Apple probably would never want to do like landline interface or an agentic interface.
Christina Warren [00:24:33]:
Well, exactly. And so, you know, whatever Apple is building and whether they think Apple would want an agentic. Yeah, I mean, I think they would, but I think that they would do it in a different way.
Leo Laporte [00:24:43]:
Right.
Christina Warren [00:24:44]:
I think that they would abstract it more than the way that it's being abstracted. And it's kind of, you know, on, you know, on main, you know, at Google events or
Andy Ihnatko [00:24:54]:
Sparks.
Leo Laporte [00:24:54]:
It's kind of aimed at real people though, compared to say Open.
Christina Warren [00:24:58]:
Sure, well, Spark is. But I'm saying, you know, some of the other stuff like, I don't know, Vapor, I don't necessarily see them getting into the developer tooling space. The way that, you know, Google is that Microsoft is that, you know, Amazon is that OpenAI and Anthropic both are. I don't know. But I, I don't feel like that that would be the right abstraction for what they're doing there. But I feel like what they can do is they can take the capabilities of whatever is going to be available in these latest models and then write that into their. When we talk about their narrative about this is how we will continue. Siri will continue to add features over time, Siri will continue to get smarter over time and they can continue to build out new integrations as that becomes available.
Christina Warren [00:25:42]:
Now what that lag will be in terms of when the model is released and when and those things can be updated up to Apple's capabilities, I don't know. This is the downside of relying on someone else's tech for, you know, part of what you're building is this, that you have to do that.
Leo Laporte [00:25:57]:
Remember what Apple said when they released, I think it was when they released itunes for Windows. They said, but the best experience will always be on Apple.
Christina Warren [00:26:05]:
Yes, right.
Leo Laporte [00:26:07]:
And I think Google will say, well, the best experience will always be on Google. Here's a question from Victor Garcia wants to know I pay for Gemini, but will I have to pay for Gemini when Apple rose out Gemini? No.
Jason Snell [00:26:24]:
Right.
Christina Warren [00:26:25]:
No. I'm sure you will.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:26]:
Oh you will.
Christina Warren [00:26:26]:
I'm sure you will.
Leo Laporte [00:26:27]:
You want those extra capabilities?
Christina Warren [00:26:28]:
Yeah. You want the extra capabilities? I'm sure that'll be exactly last year. So how much will Apple give plus now? Yeah, I don't know. I mean I assume that it'll be similar to whatever Google gives for free through the Gemini app. Now they do have a free tier. I'm assuming that it'll be, you know, very similar to the way that the GP, the ChatGPT integration works. Now this is just my guess where if you connect it to your paid ChatGPT account, you can obviously do more things with it. And I imagine that there might even be potentially a rev share agreement that says if you sign up for, you know, Gemini plus or whatever through, you know, Apple that Apple gets a cut.
Christina Warren [00:27:03]:
I have no idea. But, but I would not in any way expect all of the add on services that Google is charging $20 a month for to come to iPhone users for free just because it's part of the operating system. I mean that, that, that's insane. That's absolutely not going to.
Jason Snell [00:27:18]:
It may be that, I mean there have been those reports that they're going to let users connect with different AI providers and that's probably where that factors in is like outside of whatever Apple's Siri or whatever you want to call it is, if you want to Use Gemini. If you want to use stuff from OpenAI or Anthropic, they'll let you connect it in. But there'll be that Apple provides and that I think will be covered by your using it.
Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
Now I should mention OpenAI's according to TechCrunch and others considering suing Apple. I guess it was Bloomberg reported this that because yeah, they're talking to lawyers
Jason Snell [00:27:56]:
who might consider to consider possibly thinking about suing them, which is the weakest.
Leo Laporte [00:28:01]:
They're merely saying, hey, we're a little miffed that you chose Gemini instead of OpenAI for your model.
Jason Snell [00:28:08]:
But that's not the suing. The suing is we wish that, we wish that 2024 WWDC announcements had gone better. To which Apple would say, yeah, us too.
Leo Laporte [00:28:17]:
So does everybody. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:28:19]:
I think one of the things that's been so consistent and all that, that shared language that Jason talked about is that Apple does not want people to think that they're interacting with Gemini. They think they want to, that you're interacting with an Apple product, you're interacting with the iPhone. So that's going to be buried, buried, buried hard. So I don't think that people are going to. I think there's going to be a really hard line of demarcation between hi, you are inside Apple intelligence space. When you leave Apple intelligence space, whatever provider you use, they're going to. There's basically going to be okay, you're now leaving, you're now leaving Apple Intelligence. Good luck with that for all these extra features.
Andy Ihnatko [00:28:54]:
Because Apple really does have to balance this idea of they have to make sure that they're controlling the experience of their users. They have to give their users an Apple experience.
Leo Laporte [00:29:04]:
Is there a risk that their users will say but I really like what
Andy Ihnatko [00:29:07]:
Google's doing and that's fine. They also have to make sure that if you like what Google's or OpenAI or Claude is doing that they have access to that as well. But they can't allow themselves to become irrelevant in the sense that they've managed to stave off the idea of the iPhone is just the platform where you run a web browser and you run Instagram and you run your banking app and you run all these apps that are multi platform. They've managed to chase that off really, really effectively. AI is another threat to that kind problem. If the user interface stops being Windows and menus and mouses and stops being multitouch and starts being I'm just going to speak what I want and I'll trust that it will give me what I want. Then it just becomes I've got a premium phone and that's basically all that's got all I need. I have no necessary.
Andy Ihnatko [00:29:58]:
I have no attachment to emotional or technical, to this one platform. Every time I buy a new phone, I will go into the Verizon store, the AT&T store, and I will buy whatever has the coolest looking case. Apple has to avoid that as well. And the way they can do that is by making sure that Apple intelligence is something very, very special. And I'll just wind it up by saying, I think one of the smartest things that they're doing is that Google's mistake has always been that, hey, AI. AI. Hey, we know you love AI.
Leo Laporte [00:30:25]:
We know that. Forcing us down your throat. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:30:27]:
Whereas Apple will simply say, here's a cool feature.
Leo Laporte [00:30:29]:
Microsoft's made the same mistake and they're having to backpedal because people don't want AI I forced down their throats. This is front page of the Wall Street Journal this week. Today, rather is people hate I. They're booing them in college crowds. They're voting against AI data centers. People hate AI.
Jason Snell [00:30:48]:
When I talk about how Apple may get away with kind of missing the AI thing because of what they do, this is kind of what I mean is that in technology you get these waves where it's like new tech happens and it's really raw and a bunch of companies push it out because it's so exciting, but they haven't really figured out what the use case is. They just shove it out there because it's new. And a lot of times that's rejected. And the more they push, the more hard the rejection is because people are like, why are you giving me this? I don't know what I'm even supposed to do with it. It's just a buzzword. And the game Apple has always played is I want to take. And this goes back, like, to the Apple one. Right.
Jason Snell [00:31:29]:
Like, this has always been the game for 50 years of Apple, which is, we are going to take this technology and, and think about how you want to use it and wrap it in, like a use case. Wrap it in a feature that is a thing people want to do, a solution to a problem. And Apple has undoubtedly been so far behind and has given up in areas of AI where they're like, we're just going to use these companies that have these big models. But, like, their advantage is, I think we have been in that first phase other than like, the coding has kind of gotten there now, but, like, for consumer use, I feel like, like we're still in the give me better solutions to a problem. And the problem with what Apple showed in 2024 was a lot of. It was like, is your problem that you want to make ugly pictures sort of based on photos of people, you know, even though they were doing it and they were, and that was their mistake. So there's a chance that if Apple can take this stuff and having thought about it and sat in the corner with their head down for two years, they can, they can bring out things that actually are useful for people. Because I think, I think people, I think we've seen this in how people have used AI up to now.
Jason Snell [00:32:37]:
How you've got college kids who say they hate AI, but they use AI. It's like, if you can give people use cases, I think they will use it. I think what they hate is this kind of clueless pushing of stuff like Copilot and all this other stuff where you're like, but I don't want it. I didn't ask for it. What are you. Why are you shoving it at me? Because people don't like.
Leo Laporte [00:32:59]:
Google does that.
Jason Snell [00:33:00]:
So if you can give them what they want, they'll like it.
Andy Ihnatko [00:33:02]:
Search.
Leo Laporte [00:33:02]:
Yeah, yeah.
Christina Warren [00:33:03]:
Well, Siri does this. Apple Intelligence does this as well. Honestly, I mean, this is like a, this is very, like, fine balance, I think that all the companies are trying to, trying to find. But I agree with you. I think that so far it has not necessarily worked. And ironically, the services that have worked is when you go to those applications direct, directly, like if you're actually using cloud code, if you're using codecs, if you're using, you know, the Gemini app, you get a better experience than sometimes if you're using these other services. And that's, that's the challenge. I think that a lot of these different labs have, because they have all these different services, they all act in different ways.
Christina Warren [00:33:37]:
And all these companies, Jason's point, you know, two years ago, we're all about, well, we're just going to push this all on you. There's now kind of a little bit of a retreat because people realize, well, no, we actually want this to be useful. So I think whatever Apple shows off and however Siri is going to work and whatever their future of however AI is going to be integrated throughout their operating system works, it needs to be useful. The shortcuts thing, I think, is actually a great example if that will work as it's designed. That is exactly the sort of thing you should be doing with large language models is making it easy for people to create these sorts of automations without having to go through the convoluted process that has existed Now. I think that's exactly the sort of thing that Apple could do where you could say, hey, you know, write me something that will will make sure that I get an alert every time the garage door is left open after X period of time or whatever, or let me know if somebody knocks on the door between this hour and this hour. There are things that would be fantastic for regular users who might not have ever wanted to get into that space before that could really be unlocked, but I don't want to see the same way. I don't want to see the copilot button everywhere in Word, I don't want to see it in Apple Mail, I don't want to see it in my text messages and saying, oh, we can help you with these writing suggestions.
Christina Warren [00:34:56]:
A no you can't and B you're getting in my way and you're actually actively impeding what I'm trying to accomplish.
Andy Ihnatko [00:35:04]:
Yeah, Google Workspace does that every time. I'll open up a document and it will open up a sidebar that I will never ever use. And there are like at least four or five places for Gemini in there where again, including a floating button at the bottom that obscures something at the very, very bottom.
Leo Laporte [00:35:20]:
Yeah, so annoying. Google did little. At least I thought it was a little shot at apple on the IO stage today where they kind of showed a Genmoji like capability, only it looked so much better. Yeah, we got Image Playground. What about it? All right, we're going to take a little break. More to come. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Christina Warren, Andy Inocco, Jason Snell, Glad to have you here. A story from Aaron Tilly, writing for the Information last Wednesday, saying Apple is exploring ways to incorporate AI agents into its App Store.
Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
Now, they don't presumably plan to do AI agents themselves, but they're trying to figure out how you could have an App Store supported AI agent that would be more secure. And the information said details couldn't be learned, but staffers are designing a system to adhere to Apple's standards of privacy and security and prevent some of the more freewheeling behavior like openclaw, where agents can go haywire and delete things and stuff like that. We will see the information says next month and we now know June 8th for WWDC's keynote, which we will cover. Apple is widely expected to make a full Throated AI push. Unknown whether it will announce the agent integration with the App Store at the event. This is unclear. Clearly, Apple has to pay attention to these trends.
Andy Ihnatko [00:36:51]:
Yeah, they have to integrate that into the storytelling. The WWDC, the keynote this year, is going to be so critical that they get the storytelling correct, that they say this is the next chapter of the saga. That here is where we're going, here is where our master plan is, and here is what we think is important. And here are things by not mentioning them that we think we can leave aside right now. And yeah, they're going to have to address the idea of boy Agentix. Agentics stuff is about two years in the future where regular users are going to want to trust it and use it, but it's going to be the same sort of thing that we were into a couple of years ago with AI. We where people are using it and people who aren't people are going to start to notice, why were you able to do that so quickly? And why do you have this artwork on your stuff that's so relevant? And then they're going to want to actually have access to those same tools. And then when they find out that, if they find out that, well, my phone can't do that, my operating system can't do that, my notebook can't do that, they're going to ask, well, is there a phone or notebook or operating system that can do those things? Because I don't want to spend 45 minutes every morning summarizing and planning out my day.
Andy Ihnatko [00:37:59]:
I want to basically have this waiting for me in my inbox. I want to be able to go into WhatsApp and simply ask a message to an agent and simply say, prepare A, B and C for me and get a reply back in the same communications channel. And I've done that during the walk from my car to my office. Apple has to match that.
Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
Here's something Apple should do. But Rui Karno in the Dao of Mac blog, which he's been doing for decades, says they probably never will do. He wants a Siri for families. He says, why Siri should have the ability to understand my family as a unit. Incidentally, Google doubled down on exactly that kind of collective knowledge today at Google I/O. Do you think that this is something. Do you think Rui's right that it's never going to happen?
Christina Warren [00:38:44]:
I think this has always been the tension that Apple has always had when it comes to cloud services.
Leo Laporte [00:38:48]:
Privacy.
Christina Warren [00:38:49]:
Yeah, well, exactly. Well, I mean, I think that I'm going to Be honest, I think that they've presented it as privacy when in actuality it's maybe been about either their own interest or their own capabilities when it comes to being able to provide these sorts of higher level services. And the privacy became a really, really good way of marketing and telling a story around things that might have just been about, okay, you know, in the pre modern AI days it would have been, you know, machine learning. Maybe their machine learning prowess wasn't. It was not as good as Google's. Right? And so there were, there were fewer things that Apple could do, but instead they could say, oh, but our data is going to be. Your data is secure on our, on our devices and our servers. And so that becomes the difficult thing of like, how do you thread that needle? How do you go from having at this point, decades of building out that message to then wanting to say, okay, but we can now holistically know more about your family and we can know more holistically about the people that you want to interact with.
Christina Warren [00:39:46]:
Because those two things, in my opinion, are incompatible. And I think that it would be very difficult to. Maybe you do agree to opt in for certain members of a family, but maybe there are some things you don't want people to know about and that becomes a difficult thing too. So I think I do agree with him insofar as I don't know if this would be a thing that they could lean into it happening just because I think it goes against a lot of the core tenets that Apple has pushed out for again, like the last, like 15 years since the existence of icloud that, you know, your information is private and is kind of siloed. And there are downsides that go along with that.
Leo Laporte [00:40:25]:
Carnot writes, Apple doesn't think of families as a product category. They think of them as a collection of individual customers who happen to share a payment method. Every design decision reflects this. IPads are still single user devices. Icloud storage is pooled but grudgingly and shared files live in a sort of no man's land. App purchases are shared grudgingly in a submenu of a submenu. Family sharing is an afterthought, not a platform. He says the only thing that Apple seems to care about after imessage is that we can share what we're watching on Apple tv, which has been relevant in our family for exactly zero minutes since the feature launched.
Leo Laporte [00:41:02]:
Is Rui right? Does Apple not care? I don't know. Seems like this would be a great product category for the maybe I Don't know.
Christina Warren [00:41:10]:
I don't know if I would want this. Would any of you want it? Because I'm going to be honest with you, I don't know if I necessarily want that sort of sharing. I mean, granted, I don't have small kids, and so maybe that changes things. If you have small kids, there's a
Leo Laporte [00:41:22]:
brief period of time with children. I don't want that where you would want that. But I have to admit, Lisa turned off. She said, no, I want my own Apple account. I don't want your apps, damn it.
Christina Warren [00:41:35]:
Right? I mean, I have an Apple family account, and my parents are on it as a way to save them money for their icloud backups, basically because I pay for it. My husband's not on my family plan. And it's not because we don't trust one another. It's just. That's just not how our world works and it never has. So I think that. But I think it comes down to what you come up on, right? Because I think if you maybe come up in the Google ecosystem where it is different and you do have these ideas of, you know, like, child accounts and, you know, kind of carrying things on, maybe able to share more seamlessly, maybe that makes more sense to you, and that's great. I don't know.
Christina Warren [00:42:07]:
I think it. I think it's it. For me, it would be. I would be angry if that sort of thing changed, right? Or at least if it changed without giving me the option to keep them in these, you know, accounts that exist right now, where it's like, okay, you're people who might not even live in the same household who have a shared payment plan, which for me is completely fine. If what we're doing is subsidizing, basically saying we're going to have five users on a plan who are sharing the $45 a month that one of the users pays me for the icloud storage. And everybody gets access to Apple music. Great. But I don't know.
Andy Ihnatko [00:42:48]:
It's a very hard problem because even without technology, there's information that people in the family are okay with flowing from one member of the family to the other. There are cliques within the family. If you've got more than one kid and there's stuff that, no, there's no way I want anybody to know about this. I'm still kind of working out, like, this experience. And so if they decide to create an Apple entity known as the family, how do they create those blobs of security and privacy? It's a Non trivial problem. That said, multi user is a really, really, really multi user is necessary.
Christina Warren [00:43:25]:
Multi user. I think an iPad especially that I would love to see.
Leo Laporte [00:43:28]:
Apple's always been bad about that.
Jason Snell [00:43:29]:
Why I don't understand that's, I think there is a philosophy at Apple which is if you would like to have two people use an iPad, buy two iPads and I understand it on a level as a company that's selling hardware, but there are contexts. Right. And the fact is I've had, had, I've had friends who've tried to build apps to do this. My friend Casey List built an app that was basically you got to select what photos were going to be visible in an app that you then show to people so that they can look at photos so that they can't look at your whole photo library. Right. Because like Apple there are contexts where you want to shut it down a little bit or, or put it in a safe mode or put it in a limited mode and it's hard to do that. I, I, I don't know why. I think there's a cultural issue there.
Jason Snell [00:44:15]:
Some of it is the one to one hardware idea. Some of it is I think you've got people who maybe don't have especially kids and are not, they're, they're young enough that they're just sort of like solo operators or maybe they've got a significant other, but maybe they're coming and going and, and so they're just not thinking of themselves as individual operators. And although the managers who are higher up may think differently about it, I do, I do think sometimes that happens. The fact that it took photos like 10 years to do any sort of family sharing.
Christina Warren [00:44:49]:
Yep.
Jason Snell [00:44:49]:
And when they did it, it was engineered smartly to try to understand the idea that you may have personal photos as well as a shared pool with your family members and they did a decent job at it given that they didn't, what they didn't want is like a fire hose where you're either in or you're out and you share everything or nothing. Like my daughter is on our shared family library, but she doesn't share any of her photos with us. Right. But she can get access to the ones when she was a kid and stuff and that's fine. So like they just don't do it. I think just culturally they are not for whatever reason thinking about what do you want digitally that's shared and that's not with a family group. They like icloud families. Look, there are things about it that I really Like, I like that my mom can be on my family group and so she can, can get that icloud backup.
Jason Snell [00:45:37]:
And I like that when I buy an app that has an in app purchase that can be shared or I buy an app that can be shared, that that means my wife doesn't need to buy it. Again, Like, I like that. I think that's good. I think. And it doesn't mean she has to do it that way, but she can do it that way. And they do keep track of your purchases separately. Even in a family, you can see which ones you bought versus what other people bought. But, like, I don't know, I just come back to the fact that I think they, they add stuff after the fact.
Jason Snell [00:46:05]:
And that says something about how they don bake it in because they're not thinking about it.
Leo Laporte [00:46:10]:
Is it a cultural issue? Is Turnisk maybe gonna fix this?
Jason Snell [00:46:15]:
I think it's, I think most of it boils. And I'd like to be wrong. I'd like to be proven wrong. But like, my gut feeling about this is what I say about a lot of this stuff. It goes to like, Apple maps and all sorts of other stuff, which is who's making Apple software and who's making the decisions. And the fact is it's a lot of relatively young, relatively single people in Silicon Valley who make a lot of money. And their bosses are a little bit older and they do have some families, but they also make a lot of money and they live in Silicon Valley. And I think, you know, whether it's, oh, it gets cold here, or, oh, the metadata in this other part of the world is not the same, or you made an assumption about California, and I'm, I'm a Californian, so I get it.
Jason Snell [00:46:54]:
But like, it is, I think it comes down to that a lot of the time is that one of Apple's blind spots is that they have struggled to think of a world larger themselves than themselves. And part of it, I think, is that in the classic, Apple is all about, remember Steve Jobs, the classic line was that he never did a focus group right. They just chose what they thought was right. And I think that there was a time when Apple was a size and had the reach and filled an ecological niche and an economic niche where they could afford to do that because they were a niche product and they were charting their own course. So many of their products are so huge and they reach such a broad audience that I'm not sure you can do that, navigate that way anymore, because your lived experience is probably not A good enough match for your customers. And I've seen areas where they've learned that lesson over the last two decades or a decade and a half. But I think it's an ongoing challenge for them culturally to start thinking about, like, it's not necessarily a crime to do research about your customers. Customers.
Jason Snell [00:48:00]:
It's not necessarily, you know, going to a focus group instead of choosing what's right to do research and understand how people use your products. But I do think that maybe there's some. It's just, it's just a feeling based on what I've observed, but I think there maybe is a cultural pushback. Cultural, not individual. Right. It's not the individuals involved. You could probably talk to them and they'd all agree with this that, like, yeah, it's very important that we understand. But like, like culturally, there's still this.
Jason Snell [00:48:28]:
We don't do focus groups. We don't listen to other people. We just make a decision. And if that's in your culture, it makes it hard sometimes to step outside yourself and think of other use cases.
Andy Ihnatko [00:48:38]:
I also think that iPad is iPad. MacOS is. MacOS is a very, very hard line. Dogma. They're starting to break free from that by making the use cases blur a little bit. But for years and years and years, that was no. Why would we ever do that? That would be like a Mac sort of thing.
Leo Laporte [00:48:53]:
Thing.
Andy Ihnatko [00:48:53]:
So I do think that that's another thing. But I think you're absolutely right. That's a classic thing in all technology where engineers tend to solve problems that they can see in front of them. And so you're limited by the sort of problems that an engineer making six to mid six figures in Silicon Valley tends to have. You give a lot of people who are like, how do I have a problem where I've got so many pairs of sneakers and I can't really match the laces to this? Well, okay, that's a solution. Actually, what I want the solution to be is the. That I can only afford X amount of dollars and X amount of time to pick up my eight kids, the eight kids from my family, the family next to each other. How do we basically solve these transportation issues? It's like that's the problem that doesn't get solved.
Leo Laporte [00:49:37]:
Yeah, we were to actually, when we were doing the keynote today with Micah Sargent and Jeff Jarvis, we both, all of us noted that Silicon Valley has a culture, lives in a cultural bubble. I mean, they're talking about, about the appointments they're making and my dog has to Go to the doggy daycare, because we're going. And it's like, this is not the world most people live in. And it really harms Silicon Valley because they're making products for themselves, but not for the mass majority of users.
Jason Snell [00:50:11]:
Now you can step outside that. Like, I mean, these companies do have offices all over the world, although they tend to be in urban areas. And so you're going to get a certain kind of professional either way. But whether it's a Silicon Valley bubble or individual bubbles or whatever, I do think that one of the things, like I said, I don't think these companies, when they weren't this big, had to deal with this. I think Apple used to navigate on its own, kind of like do what's right and that that worked for them. But I'll give you a really simple kind of dumb example of how this bites you, which is when they did AirPods and AirPods Pro, they, I believe the story is basically they looked at the shapes of the ears of the people who worked at Apple and they tested it on people who worked at Apple about how do they feel? And when they came out with, I forget, maybe it was the first AirPods Pro, they told me, oh, it turns out we need to measure more ears because our original AirPods didn't fit as well as we thought they would because our group of ears was not representative of the range of ear shapes in the world. And when the AirPods Pro 2 came out, they told this story to me again and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know we said that about AirPods Pro, but we, we really needed even more data to make this shape fit a wider range of ears better. And that's, that's a great example where they got a lesson because they built hardware and you can't update hardware later.
Jason Snell [00:51:40]:
And people were like, I can't use this product because it doesn't fit my ears. And they learned we were being a little too insular with something as dumb as, like, I mean dumb, but also super important that if you're going to make earbuds, they better fit. And if everybody you work with says they fit, that doesn't mean they fit. It means they fit people who work at Apple. And I think that's all of these companies as they've gotten larger. This is the struggle. I think it's a struggle for everybody, not just Apple, but it is a struggle, which is you don't want to do everything by, you know, a poll. But at the same time, you do need to have a culture of understanding who Your audience is who your customers are and how their needs are much broader.
Jason Snell [00:52:21]:
Which is why I want to differentiate between like a focus group and market research because those are, those can be different. And understanding your, who your customers are and what their lives are like is important. All you have to look is at. I think the best example of the disconnect is commercials for AI. TV commercials for AI all of which use examples that are, are nonsense. Or you could say like the, that Apple intelligence thing at 2024 WWDC where they did the I wonder what breed this dog is. The owner is standing right here but I'm going to ignore them and take a picture and ask.
Leo Laporte [00:52:58]:
It's like all look out the window and say I wonder what the weather's like.
Jason Snell [00:53:01]:
Siri yeah, they're ginned up examples that don't really make sense because they haven't thought it through. So I just, I think it's a really interesting subject because I think this is one of those areas where like some of the most powerful companies in the world still kind of have some boxes they could check to make their stuff better.
Leo Laporte [00:53:21]:
Well, we're moving the wrong direction. We're eliminating diversity, we're eliminating inclusion. Boardrooms are becoming increasingly white male, not the other way.
Jason Snell [00:53:32]:
I would argue the building of AI models leads to a lot of homogeneity of output. Right. Which means it gives you an answer and that answer is based on an average and it doesn't necessarily actually fit what the real answer is.
Leo Laporte [00:53:44]:
So I understand why the kids are booing at these college commencements. I really do. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes. I think feel very privileged and fortunate. Have grown up in an era where there was some opportunity. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:53:58]:
And one of the major problems with AI is that we're all going to whatever the ecological effects are going to be, we're all going to suffer them planet wide. But not everybody on the planet is going to get the benefits of AI and those are the sort of things that cause trouble when it's really, really great that wow, I've got a hundred $150 million company and I've made it much more valuable because I'm using AI tools that I've been able to retool my company to use AI and now basically we're even wealthier than ever.
Leo Laporte [00:54:30]:
That's great.
Andy Ihnatko [00:54:31]:
But again there are people in this country that are not going to benefit from that whatsoever. But they're still going to have problems with power shortages that regionally are still going to have problems with Water and other shortages. It's not an either or proposition, but. But the thing is the benefits get distributed very, very indiscriminately and unfairly.
Leo Laporte [00:54:52]:
Yep. I just learned that 50% of the American population can't make enough to pay for food, rent, clothing and medical that they're underwater. Suddenly 25% of buy now pay later loans are for groceries. 25% last year months.
Andy Ihnatko [00:55:16]:
And there can be solutions to figure out. How do we redistribute food that is not being sent to the correct communities? There is food deserts in which even if you had the money to pay for groceries, how do you get to the place where you buy the groceries? You have to go to a convenience store because there is no supermarket nearby. We'll get into the long harangue, but those are the solutions that we hope that AI and other technologies will step up to try to solve. But unfortunately that's not the sort of thing that gets people excited.
Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
Looks like they're going the other way, to be honest with you. The rich get richer. We're going to take a little break. This is MacBreak Weekly. You're watching and we're glad you are with Andy Inocco, Communist living in the library. Proud pinko red diaper baby Christina Warren. She works for a small little firm called GitHub. And you know what? God bless them.
Leo Laporte [00:56:14]:
God bless him. I love GitHub. When is the conference coming up? Is it soon?
Christina Warren [00:56:20]:
Well, so Microsoft Build is in two weeks and we will have a presence there. So that's going to be in San francisco on January, June 1st through 3rd or 2nd and 3rd I think is when it is. And then GitHub universe is in October. That's our big conference. But yeah, we'll be at Microsoft build in two weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:56:40]:
Good, because I want my GitHub badge again. I missed it last year.
Christina Warren [00:56:43]:
Yeah, we'll make sure we get you
Leo Laporte [00:56:44]:
one because Christina wasn't working there.
Christina Warren [00:56:47]:
I wasn't there. But I'm back so I'll make sure
Jason Snell [00:56:51]:
to get you one.
Leo Laporte [00:56:51]:
I have a whole series of GitHub badges. I love them. Also Jason Snell from sixcolors.com what are people all up in arms about about these days at Six Colors at Arms.
Jason Snell [00:57:06]:
There's very few pitchforks and torches right now.
Leo Laporte [00:57:09]:
Serene space.
Jason Snell [00:57:11]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Everybody just writing for WWDC, right? This is the calm before.
Leo Laporte [00:57:16]:
Always hard to do shows in these, you know, last few weeks before the big conference. But I have to say I'm glad Google did IE today because it gave us a Lot of grist for the mill. A lot of stuff to think about. How is that? And I'm sure Apple, Apple is really thinking hard about this at this point. It made me wonder, you know, maybe people should just be buying chromebooks instead of MacBooks. Do you think Apple's threatened to buy this? You can get a Chromebook for half the price of a Neo.
Andy Ihnatko [00:57:49]:
Probably not, because a MacBook is not a Chromebook. I love Chromebooks. One of my favorite laptops of all time has been a Chromebook. But Chromebooks are a very, very separate thing. It's going to be. Google really stepped on a rake when they introduced the Google Book last week without really telling people. This is just a sneak preview. We're not actually showing you the whole thing yet.
Leo Laporte [00:58:10]:
I bet it slowed down sales.
Andy Ihnatko [00:58:12]:
I mean it looked lame, it looked stupid, it looked like, well, great, you've got Android and a laptop, so what else are you going to show me? And no idea of what the price is going to be. So that they did say they're going for sort of a premium sort of build, premium sort of processor. So we're not talking about $300 laptops, but if they can create a $500 premium notebook that is super thin, super light, has more battery life than a Neo, can arguably be more useful day to day than a NEO with its 1 1/2 USB ports, that could be an interesting head to head. But again, we're not going to know until the fall.
Leo Laporte [00:58:53]:
Let's see, let's talk about iOS 27. Here it comes. We'll see it for the first time on June 8th at WWDC. Ryan Christoffel Writing at 9to5Mac, iOS27's new design leak sounds a lot about what I've been wanting most. This comes from Gurman, by the way. Gurman's Sunday piece. The only thing I could deduce from it was this weird, oh, Siri might be able to delete messages, which didn't seem like a feature I really was looking for.
Jason Snell [00:59:24]:
Well, I think he's, he's thinking of like, what's the chat bot interface going to be like? And, and is it going to be more like, yeah, you're right. I mean it's, it's about what details he happened to get and that, that's one that they're going to be like a default auto delete and then you can set it for different things. But I think he's just trying to iterate on that same idea that they're, they're essentially out of the Dynamic island, actually, which is kind of interesting. And with a gesture they're building a Siri interf face that can also be more chatbot like because people seem to like that. And you know, I having a Siri chat history with like they should have done that a long time ago. The AI thing is the thing that finally got them there. But you're starting to see like the Dynamic island detail I think is kind of fascinating because, you know, you're, you're seeing how does Apple build this kind of assistant tech into its existing interface on the iPhone. The idea that it might be kind of finally a merge between Siri and Spotlight, which I think is really welcome in the sense that right now where you depending on where you type, you get completely different responses.
Jason Snell [01:00:31]:
And why is that? So like it's all going to be in the details. And Gurman, you know, as good as a reporter as he is, does not have all the details and we're going to have to wait for the, the actual event to, to get all of that. But like they're obviously, according to him doing the work to try to build a better experience. That is like Siri all was used to be so abstract. And I think they want to make this new experience be a feature that you can get to and you can look at and you can control like an app. And like, yeah, that's. I don't know why it took this long, but yeah, that's a good idea.
Christina Warren [01:01:07]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:01:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:09]:
He says the image playground has been completely redesigned.
Christina Warren [01:01:12]:
Yippee.
Andy Ihnatko [01:01:13]:
It would almost have to be
Leo Laporte [01:01:17]:
Apple's adding a new describe a change option to easily edit an image after it's created, I guess in a prompt in text. Upgraded models to make the images created with the app more lifelike. They couldn't be less lifelike. So I guess more is good.
Christina Warren [01:01:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:32]:
The weather app will have a new conditions section on the main page. More in depth data for things like rain and wind. You know, that is one thing that grapes me a little bit. They bought Dark sky, shut it down, and yet didn't incorporate any of its good stuff into Apple Weather.
Jason Snell [01:01:49]:
Well, I mean a lot of that is in there. The precipitation forecasts are right out of Dark sky and they're using Dark Sky's API and that API is now the Apple Weather API. So I mean, a lot of dark. It's not Dark sky because, you know, again, Dark sky was a niche weather app for people who cared about the details. And Apple Weather is never going to be that. But, but the Dark Sky API is also now whatever weather kit and people can get that and use that. And it's basically the same sort of stuff. It's not.
Leo Laporte [01:02:13]:
It did create a very fertile ecosystem.
Jason Snell [01:02:15]:
The weather app's better because of it. Yeah, the weather app is better.
Leo Laporte [01:02:18]:
The radar and all that stuff, some
Jason Snell [01:02:21]:
of that's in there. I mean, it's in there. You got to find it.
Christina Warren [01:02:23]:
But yeah, it's just buried a little bit more. I think, I think that it's just. But to Jason's point, I mean, it's the weather app for everyone. It's not just for the, for the weather nerds. So that, that's.
Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
Everybody loves weather. Everybody's a weather nerd.
Christina Warren [01:02:33]:
No, but, but I mean, but you have different expectations if you've purchased an app like Dark sky and you open and use that, versus my mom, who's just going to want to see what the forecast is. Right. Like, I think that that's the, the line you have to balance. And I think they've done an okay job with it. I'm glad that Acme Weather is now, you know, an app again from that team so that you can have those things. And I was glad that they kept Weather Kit around, although I was upset that they shut down the Dark Sky API the way that they did that. But other people were able to kind of pop in and come up with drop in replacements. But yeah, I mean, we'll see what they're going to do.
Christina Warren [01:03:06]:
It is interesting to see how some of the leaks are kind of trickling out. I think Jason made a point, was it last week that a lot of Gurman's sources seem to be designers. And so a lot of these things do seem to be in some ways kind of reinforcing, like, oh, no, but this interface that everybody hates, you hate it because you're on culture. But we're going to fix some basic things that should have always been fixed. And look, I'm a big liquid glass hater on macOS. I'm ambivalent about it on iOS, to be honest. But if they can do something. Where I do have an issue is there are very real, I would argue, accessibility problems with the way that, especially the way the tabbing works and being able to see through certain things, it wasn't thought through correctly.
Christina Warren [01:03:53]:
And if you don't have perfect vision or if you don't have the right type of background match with what you're trying to do, it isn't always very legible. They can fix some of that stuff. Yay.
Leo Laporte [01:04:06]:
So, among other things, Google announced in the new Android and they showed it today, which I really liked is Rambler. Andy, what is Rambler? It's good for people like me, let's put it that way.
Andy Ihnatko [01:04:20]:
It's a, it's a piece of, of game tech. Well, not game technology, but it's a. Based on. Here's what it is. And I'm, I'm actually interested.
Leo Laporte [01:04:29]:
He's rambling right now, folks. He's demonstrating Rambler.
Andy Ihnatko [01:04:33]:
Yeah, exactly. So what, you know, because sometimes you, you talk, you say, oh wait, no, that's not Tuesday. That happens on Wednesday. It will basically figure out, okay, he's basically. I'm not going to say. I'm not going to put all that in there. I'm going to make it so that he just always said Tuesday. It smooths out a lot of the things that, when you're speaking, speaking because
Leo Laporte [01:04:50]:
we don't speak in perfect sentences and you know, so that's. I hope Apple takes that part.
Andy Ihnatko [01:04:58]:
Yeah. And that's going to be part of gboard, which is going to be. That's bad news for Apple because people there's.
Leo Laporte [01:05:05]:
You're talking about the Google keyboard on Android.
Andy Ihnatko [01:05:07]:
That's right, the Google keyboard on Android. Because there's some, there's some problems that it doesn't cause people to revolt immediately. It's just that little things can keep building and building and building and I've
Leo Laporte [01:05:17]:
never seen so many keyboard on the iPhone getting worse. It seems like it's getting worse.
Andy Ihnatko [01:05:22]:
It's hard for me to use. I don't. And that's not even talking about the lack of features in it. I mean it's, it's not terribly accurate. But the thing is like I, I tend to, I have to go from other people's comments because obviously I'm using an iPhone maybe like a half hour a day sometimes I'll be using it like for three or four hours at a shot. I'm not using it each and every day for all my interactions, but I do notice that. So I don't know if it's because my Android keyboard is. Just knows me much better, but there's
Leo Laporte [01:05:50]:
so much actually going downhill.
Andy Ihnatko [01:05:52]:
Yeah, that's what people keep saying because of bugs or because of. It's just not as good.
Leo Laporte [01:05:56]:
The prediction isn't as good and it misunderstands my typing more. Am I wrong? Jason? Is that.
Jason Snell [01:06:03]:
No. I ended up resetting my keyboard dictionary because. Which you can do you actually have to go under. It's under the reset set menu and erase menu. So you're like, no, no, it couldn't be. But that's actually where it is. And it wipes out your dictionary, which means it starts from scratch and it doesn't know you. But, like, I was getting such weird responses that I decided I would do that.
Jason Snell [01:06:24]:
I don't know if it's actually helped at all, but I think they. I think, you know, I don't know what's going on there. They switched to that transformer model. It was supposed to be better. Sometimes it's better. Sometimes it's where I find myself a lot, especially on the iPad, had I find myself typing things that absolutely can't be anything else but what I intended. And the Apple's response is like, I guess you mean this thing that's not a word. And it's like, it's so close to the actual word, you can see where my fingerprints were when I wrote it.
Jason Snell [01:06:53]:
Why would you not suggest that as the word I'm writing there? And it happens all the time. So I. I just. I don't understand what they're doing.
Leo Laporte [01:07:01]:
It also bugs me that you can't do. You can't do swipe on the iPad,
Jason Snell [01:07:06]:
and that also bugs me. Right. You can do it on the iPhone on the small keyboard, but they don't do it on the big keyboard.
Leo Laporte [01:07:10]:
I have to type it like a. Like a caveman.
Jason Snell [01:07:13]:
Sometimes I'm, like, drinking tea, sitting in bed in the morning, I'm drinking tea, and I got my other hand and I have to type something in, and I'm like, one letter at a time, and it's like, I could just swipe it, but it's not there. I don't know. I. I like. Like, I'm just reduced to. Maybe next year it'll be better. Like. Like, that's all I can say about it, is it's not great.
Leo Laporte [01:07:33]:
So where do I go? I go to General Reset.
Jason Snell [01:07:36]:
Yeah. Scary.
Leo Laporte [01:07:38]:
That is really scary.
Christina Warren [01:07:39]:
I was gonna say. I was gonna say. I was gonna ask you about this, Jason.
Jason Snell [01:07:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:07:42]:
And then what? Reset or erase all contents and settings.
Jason Snell [01:07:45]:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There should be a dictionary or keyboard setting in.
Leo Laporte [01:07:51]:
Here's one that says transfer to Android. Maybe I'll just do that.
Jason Snell [01:07:54]:
You could do that. That would be another way to go if you want to do that. That.
Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
So should I go to keyboard? Maybe the reset's there.
Jason Snell [01:08:00]:
No. General transfer or reset iPhone. Oh, no, maybe it's not there. General erase all content and settings. Nope, that's not it.
Leo Laporte [01:08:10]:
They moved it again.
Jason Snell [01:08:11]:
Where is It. Yeah, because it's down in one of those, in one of those settings.
Leo Laporte [01:08:15]:
It's not in where you would expect at the keyboard settings.
Jason Snell [01:08:18]:
That's where it used to be. Where'd they move it? Apple. Come on. Well, so much for that tip.
Leo Laporte [01:08:28]:
Apple. I gotta.
Jason Snell [01:08:29]:
Oh, no, it's reset. You have to tap reset.
Leo Laporte [01:08:32]:
And then not only is it scary
Jason Snell [01:08:34]:
the reset, you get the reset network settings, which is really great if you're having weird network behavior.
Leo Laporte [01:08:39]:
Like, that's a good one to know.
Christina Warren [01:08:40]:
Oh yeah. And it pops up. Reset keyset. It'll reset. Keyboard dictionary.
Jason Snell [01:08:44]:
Dictionary is in there.
Leo Laporte [01:08:46]:
So it's reset the button. Reset is really a set of all the things of all the other buttons.
Christina Warren [01:08:51]:
That is horrible. UI super scary. Yeah. But that.
Leo Laporte [01:08:54]:
This is very easy to hit the wrong.
Christina Warren [01:08:56]:
It would. This is, and this is so unlike Apple. Like, this is. They've. They used, they use this UI pattern a few places, but not many. So. But you're not used to seeing another list that way. I'm going to ask you, Jason, because I've seen this tip that other people have given to and I haven't done it.
Christina Warren [01:09:10]:
Do you think it made a difference or not? Because I. However many years, this goes back with my, my dictionary and it's obviously not great. But I also don't want to have to have it relearn very specific words that I type all the time.
Jason Snell [01:09:23]:
I mean, and then if you type it all the time, it'll come back. It really is. Like if you are, if you are just at wit's end, I would say give it a try. Like I, I felt like it couldn't get worse.
Leo Laporte [01:09:34]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:09:35]:
Like, so I just reset it.
Christina Warren [01:09:36]:
But about names, is it still like, if someone's in your contact list, like, does it reset that too? Because that's, that's the thing. Okay.
Jason Snell [01:09:42]:
The contact checklist is still there and it still uses that as, as info. So.
Christina Warren [01:09:45]:
Okay.
Jason Snell [01:09:46]:
It will still. If there's a last name you're trying to type and it's in your contacts, it'll know that that's one probably what you're trying to type. I don't recommend this necessarily for everybody, but if you like you're at wit's end and you're like, I can't stand it. Give it a try. Like, and, and if it is, if you will lose that training. But like if there's a word you type all the time, you'll learn it. You'll type it a couple of times and say, no, that's what I mean. And it'll learn it again and that'll be okay.
Jason Snell [01:10:09]:
Okay. It's not a panacea.
Leo Laporte [01:10:11]:
But all the time, Safari is getting a new start page with four tabs across the top to easily move between favorites, bookmarks, a reading list of saved articles, and browsing history. Okay, what else? Apple's tweaking the tab bar across the bottom of several. This is all minor.
Christina Warren [01:10:31]:
Yeah, this is all this is.
Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
Clearly, Mark is going to his design friends. Hey, yeah, give me. I gotta write a column.
Andy Ihnatko [01:10:37]:
Safari needs a revolution.
Christina Warren [01:10:39]:
Yeah, I was gonna say, like, there's so many things would have to be changed for me to actually get excited about Safari updates one way or another. Right. Which isn't even necessarily a critic. I mean, I have lots of criticisms, but I'm mostly satisfied with it. So yay. New Borrow.
Leo Laporte [01:10:56]:
So here's. You use Safari then, not as your browser on your iPhone?
Christina Warren [01:11:00]:
Oh, no, I use Safari. Safari.
Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
Yeah. Because we know that at least in the us, if you use Chrome or something else, it's still Safari under the hood, it's still Safari. It's just different ui. But isn't that changing thanks to the EU or not in the us not
Jason Snell [01:11:17]:
in the US and in the eu. Right. That's theoretically possible, but it's not actually happening.
Christina Warren [01:11:22]:
I was going to say no, because, I mean, it takes a lot of work.
Leo Laporte [01:11:27]:
They want us to write a whole. A whole new version of Firefox for the iPhone.
Jason Snell [01:11:30]:
And in the eu. In the eu, yeah. I think everybody else who's got a browser was like, it's not really plausible for us to just do this for the eu.
Leo Laporte [01:11:36]:
They could, but they're just not going to.
Christina Warren [01:11:38]:
They could, but this is sort of the problem with these sorts of things is that, like, the, the EU gets very excited and they're like, look at how important we are. And then the rest of the world goes, actually, no, we're not going to do this just for you.
Leo Laporte [01:11:50]:
Yeah, you're not that important to us.
Andy Ihnatko [01:11:53]:
But the desktop versions of. Between Chrome and. Actually between Safari and pretty much anything else, it's like, like, it's like going from black and white to Technicolor.
Christina Warren [01:12:01]:
Oh, yeah. To be clear, I don't mind safari on, on iOS.
Andy Ihnatko [01:12:05]:
Right, right. What do you.
Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
Okay, this is a good time to pull our fabulous panel.
Jason Snell [01:12:10]:
Amazing.
Andy Ihnatko [01:12:11]:
What do you.
Leo Laporte [01:12:11]:
What is your desktop browser, Christina?
Christina Warren [01:12:14]:
I'm, I'm, I'm on Chrome, I mean, or, or Chrome Chromium variant. It depends. I mean, sometimes I use the Helium browser. I liked ARC a lot, but no, I'm, I'm a Chrome person. I miss ARC too. I, I'm, I'm a Chrome person and I was a Safari Die Hard until about eight years ago. And then I just got to the point where I went, why am I torturing myself? Why am I having a lesser, worse experience? Just because I felt like, you know, maybe their adherence to certain types of standards was better and it wasn't. And the battery life argument that people used to make Chrome is actually more efficient in a lot of ways.
Christina Warren [01:12:48]:
Same is also true for some of the RAM usage stuff. So like, like, no, I'm a Chrome person for better or worse and it's not even my favorite browser. There are a lot of things I like about what Firefox does better, but for rendering things the way that they need to be rendered, sometimes Chrome's faster than using. It's just Chrome.
Leo Laporte [01:13:04]:
It's so much faster. How about you, Andy? What's your default browser on the.
Andy Ihnatko [01:13:07]:
Absolutely Chrome. And the first reason why it was Chrome was because I did want to have cross platform bookmark syncing. And so at the time I was willing to take the hit 4 weaker battery life on my MacBook and my iPad and stuff like that. But now, like Christina said, they've really, they knew that that was a problem and they have pretty much addressed it at this point. So I don't really see that much of a difference. But on top of everything else, it's just simply I'm looking, I've got a Chrome window right in front of me right now and I've got. Recently they added vertical tabs. So now instead of.
Andy Ihnatko [01:13:41]:
So now I have that entire section of my window back and to the very, very left of the window there is a tiny little strip of like mini icons showing me because I go right from one app or one document or one feature to the other as much, much cleaner. It's got split views. It basically stole a lot of really great ideas from ARC and the number of times where I'm writing a show doc in Google Docs and I basically can basically have one full screen experience in which I don't have to worry about. Yes, I can have two windows side by side, but then I have to manage the gap between the two of them. So many nice little productivity features that just make it a much more comfortable place to be. It is a very modern browser, just like other competitors to Safari are modern browsers. Whereas Safari is like, wow, it's good for what it is. But what it is is a very 2017, 2018 view of how we use
Leo Laporte [01:14:32]:
the web all right, Jason, convince me to use Safari.
Jason Snell [01:14:38]:
Every time I open Chrome up I feel a little bit sick.
Leo Laporte [01:14:43]:
I don't want to use Chrome.
Jason Snell [01:14:44]:
I mean I have the advantage of being only on Apple's platform. So the, the bookmark syncing and everything else works really great for me. I don't see why I would use Chrome. Every time I use it, I hate it. And I want to use Safari and I go back to Safari. I've tried some of the alternative browsers. I don't like them. I heard somebody saying the other day about how interesting the side tabs feature is.
Leo Laporte [01:15:12]:
Like no, you can do left tabs now.
Jason Snell [01:15:14]:
I just don't, I just, I'm sorry. I find Safari to be fast and useful and I hate it when I have to. And I will say this about it. I don't understand why there is a whole raft of features, especially video conferencing features that Apple refuses to put in WebKit or Safari. I don't understand it. It's been for years now. There are all of these fairly, I mean they used to be cutting edge audio ones, now there's fairly cutting edge video ones. They all work on Chrome and Chromium browsers.
Jason Snell [01:15:44]:
They use web standards and when you talk to Apple they look like you don't, they don't even know what you're talking about. They've never really supported the web RTC stuff for real time communication. And as a result I do use Chrome because if I want to record in any of the podcast recording apps that are web based I'm using Restream and I have to use Chrome. Yeah, have to use Chrome. So that's on Apple. Like I don't. And that's always the risk with this is like if Apple just decides it's not going to support something thing it makes Safari less interesting. But that said, every time I go over to Chrome I'm like how quickly can I quit this app? Because I don't, I don't particularly like it and I'm not like a super anti Google person.
Jason Snell [01:16:24]:
I use, like I said earlier in the show, I use Gmail, that's my email.
Leo Laporte [01:16:28]:
I use the Chromium or any of the other Chromium spins.
Jason Snell [01:16:33]:
Yeah. You know in the end it's so, and, and this is the velvet trap right of being an Apple user who's in and I can afford to do it because I'm in the ecosystem everywhere is it's way more convenient to use Safari because my open tabs on my iPad, show up on my Mac and my bookmarks, sync and all of those things happen. And if I wanted to, if I like Safari on my iPhone but not on my Mac, well, what do I do then? Because now they're out of sync regardless. It's just a lot easier to do it. And I have never, I have never felt like I had a reason to stop. But I am also well aware that that is Apple using its power as the platform owner. And also I am well aware of all the times that I have to launch Chrome to do stuff. And I don't like it because it reminds me of back in the day where you would go to a site with an Apple browser and be told you can't use it because you're using a Mac or because you're not using Internet Explorer.
Jason Snell [01:17:34]:
I do not like that. And I do not like that the fact that years into real time communication in Safari or on the web using web standards, there are standards that Apple just refuses to support. I don't, I don't understand it and I do not like it because I feel like Safari should strive to be the most compatible browser it can be. And anytime Apple throws their weight around like that, I have to assume, even though it may not be true, I kind of assume it means there's some strategic reason that they just decided to block something, something altogether because they don't want people building web apps using it on iOS. And I hate that.
Leo Laporte [01:18:12]:
Well, there you go.
Jason Snell [01:18:13]:
But Safari all the way.
Leo Laporte [01:18:15]:
Safari or die. I use, I mean, I don't have a tattoo.
Jason Snell [01:18:20]:
I don't have like a Safari tattoo or something. I don't go that far. I'm not a ride or die with Safari, but I am, I am all in for now.
Leo Laporte [01:18:27]:
I use Zen browser, which is a Firefox.
Christina Warren [01:18:31]:
Yes, Zen is great. Well, it's.
Leo Laporte [01:18:33]:
Arc is why I use it.
Christina Warren [01:18:35]:
Yeah, I was gonna say it's very similar. Yeah, I loved arc.
Jason Snell [01:18:37]:
Yeah.
Christina Warren [01:18:37]:
The only problem that I have with Firefox sometimes, and I love people at Mozilla and I love what they're doing. But again, like you run into those little niggles and like I was, I was Jason, you know, eight years ago. And then my life changed and my circumstances changed and even though I still was just using, you know, Mac devices, when you have to, if every single day you're interacting with websites that don't work well in your browser, browser that sort of changes what you're willing to put up with and what you're not. And you know, I don't know, I use pin boards still, even though I'm sure they're better bookmarking sync tools. But that's what I've been using for the longest time. So for me, that's also part of why I feel like I can switch browsers more frequently. My default browser is actually an app called Choosey, which lets you basically choose what web browser you want to use for a certain task. And I have it set.
Christina Warren [01:19:25]:
So basically opens up. So. So Slack links always open in a certain profile in Google Chrome for work. Right. Email is always going to open in a certain profile for something else and you can have rules to do that. So that's actually my default browser is Choosy, and there are other apps like that too. And so I can kind of switch back and forth.
Andy Ihnatko [01:19:44]:
But yeah, and to be fair, I think that most people, like benefit from having more than one browser installed for different purposes.
Leo Laporte [01:19:52]:
We all have to have more than one browser, right? I mean, that's kind of a requirement almost. Yeah, yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:19:56]:
I had had. I had to look up a. The name of a commercial product and whenever. And I didn't. I just needed to know some information about it. I didn't want this become, hey, he's interested in buying like a Harrier Jump Jet. It's like, so that's, that's when you fire up Tor, saying, I just want to know when was this manufactured and like where. How much does these do these.
Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
We hear you want to buy a Harrier Jump Jet. I once searched for a Linotype. We were talking, Jeff Jarvis and I were talking and he said, you can still buy line of types. And I search for it and now I get ads like, I'm going to buy a line of type. For years, ever since I've been getting ads for Linotypes. They just emails and like, you know, are you still interested in Linotype? Because we got some hell of a deal. No.
Andy Ihnatko [01:20:40]:
If I had an unused Linotype in my storage unit, I would be desperate to unhold it.
Leo Laporte [01:20:44]:
I think that's what's going on. Any port in a spot, I beg
Jason Snell [01:20:47]:
you, please buy my Linotype.
Leo Laporte [01:20:51]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy, Christina, Jason, we're so glad you're here. Let's talk about the iPhone a little bit. IPhone sales still going well, I guess. We knew that from the quarterly, quarterly results, but others are confirming it. Apple gained share across ATT T Mobile and Verizon in the quarter. This is according to Counterpoint's US Monthly Smartphone channel share tracker. Yeah. Oh, the C U M S, C S T.
Leo Laporte [01:21:28]:
Well, exactly. There you go.
Andy Ihnatko [01:21:31]:
It was big because their report says it was up 1.3% in the US but in a world, in a country in which smartphones declined 5.7% year over
Leo Laporte [01:21:41]:
year and Android fell 14.4%.
Andy Ihnatko [01:21:45]:
But that is just like the first quarter. That's a quarter in which like most of the flagship Android phones are in different quarters. But nonetheless it's kind of.
Christina Warren [01:21:53]:
Yeah, it's still interesting to see that and to be interesting to, you know, see especially I think, like, because what else has really launched, I guess since then, I guess we had like the Pixel, the cheaper Pixel phone and the Samsung flagships, but I don't know how compelling any of those were. I think this goes back to what we were saying a couple of weeks ago, which is that like the base iPhone, they did such a good job with the iPhone 17 this year that I'm not surprised at all to see that the sales have been so good because they really did make, I think not only a good argument to upgrade if you had a phone that was three or four years old or older than that, but to even people who would maybe have historically maybe been an iPhone, like SE or E user in general to say, okay, I'm going to spend that extra, you know, $200 and get the better screen and the better front facing camera and all the other features that just, I don't know, they, they knocked it out of the park this time with iPhones.
Leo Laporte [01:22:49]:
Yeah, nice. Just, I mean, kind of curious. The prepaid and low cost smartphone segments continue to weaken. They think it's because of course, higher gas prices and debt payments, sales weakness particularly severe below the $100 smartphone tier where of course Apple doesn't compete at all. So really kind of a gloomy market except for the premium.
Christina Warren [01:23:15]:
Yeah, well, and I think, well, and it's interesting too because I, I hang out on some of the subreddits where I guess people have like the no contract stuff because I have a second line that I don't have on my main Verizon plan because it is actually like embarrassingly cheaper to just have it within mobile. But it's one of those things where you pay a year in advance and you pay the equivalent of $15 a month and then after that year you're going to need to find another carrier. So I'm like looking at, okay, who are these other carriers? And they are doing pretty good deals. I wonder if what's happening with that lower end market is that there had been, I Think a window where people were almost kind of arbitraging and figuring out how long do I need to stay on this month to month carrier before I can have the phone unlocked and then sell it and do other things. And they've put in more restrictions on that. And so I wonder if maybe that's part of why that that hundred dollar market is. Is falling because it's. There's more constraints on, on what you all have, what you have to commit to to even get that $100 phone.
Leo Laporte [01:24:11]:
Right. So more rumors about the. What we think is going to be called the ultra. The folding iPhone. I still. Do we know if it's going to be a halfway decent camera or. That's my biggest concern about the camera. The whole thing.
Christina Warren [01:24:27]:
I don't know.
Andy Ihnatko [01:24:28]:
I don't think anyone said anything about that.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
Yeah, the rumors aren't clear. We assume. Well we assume not though because of the form factor. It's got to be thin. They will have. According to the rumor, 9to5Mac is reporting on two rear lenses plus two front face facing the 48 megapixel main and the 48 megapixel ultra wide. That means no telephoto which I've been using a lot. When I was in Hawaii I used that 8x a lot and love it.
Leo Laporte [01:25:01]:
I really love it. Like it's really good. Yeah, it's really good. Means I didn't need to bring a pro camera with me.
Christina Warren [01:25:07]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:25:08]:
The reason of course for the two front facing cameras is there are two displays. There's one when it's closed and there's one when it's open. According to 9 to 5 Mac not much is known about these cameras. So there you go. I guess you could assume it'll be the same 18 megapixel center stage camera that's on the 17. And we have talked to Mark Gurman has talked extensively about the new software which will. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what they do with the fold. Gurman says side by side apps.
Leo Laporte [01:25:41]:
So the left half and the right half can have separate apps and iPad like app layouts but not clear whether it'll be iPad OS or iPhone OS.
Jason Snell [01:25:50]:
Well they're the same so it's just a semantic issue. They'll probably do a different tiling interface
Andy Ihnatko [01:25:54]:
for it actually I don't know. Maybe they'll get rid of overlapping windows. But like split view is a natural for this device. Slide over is a natural for this device. Like for a smaller screen. It seems as though if all they did was simply implement those two very well and handle the transition from hey, I've got a phone in my hand to hey, I've now got an iPad mini in my hand hand. I'm hoping and expecting and anticipating they'll do something very, very special with it.
Jason Snell [01:26:21]:
It's all there for them to use. They just have to pick and choose. But saying iPad or iOS, I was like, it's the same OS, so it's just what features do they want to make available?
Leo Laporte [01:26:29]:
How easy that. To have kind of like an iPhone, but have center. Not center stage, just slide over on it and stuff. Like, is that an easy. Do we even know?
Jason Snell [01:26:40]:
Probably not. I mean it's literally in the code base. So I always hesitate to say how easy it is. They have to come up with an interaction model for it because they won't do the thing where you turn on multi window mode like you do on the iPad. They will have to decide what that interaction model is and how it works and that will be interesting to see. But all the functionality is there for them to do and for app developers already supported and like it's. It's all just sitting there for them. So it's just a matter of how they choose to.
Jason Snell [01:27:06]:
It's like they've got all the ingredients, they just have to choose how they plate them.
Christina Warren [01:27:10]:
Now I think the interesting thing will be what apps will you be able to install, right? Will it only take iPhone apps or. Because there. Because there is still a demarcation where there are some apps that are still only designed for iPhone and some that are only designed for iPad. Will that go away? Will it only be viewable in a certain mode? I'm not really sure and I feel like that's in some ways kind of a problem of Apple's own making to a certain extent. Like, I don't begrudge just having the iPhone mode per se. I do think a little bit that there is. It's a little weird, I think. And I guess I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna.
Christina Warren [01:27:42]:
While I'm saying this, I'm gonna disagree with myself. The point I was gonna make, I was like, oh, well, you know, you should just. If it's on the iPad, it should also be on the phone. I can understand there's scenarios where you might not want that either, but I think that'll be the interesting demarcation. I have a feeling they'll probably just do like if it runs on the iPhone, then it's there, but if it has a tablet view, then Maybe it can do that for slide over or for multi window if, if they do that, but I'm not really sure. But that'll be the interesting thing to see if, if you know, they'll make any, any I guess concessions there because for some app developers it is completely different apps and that would be, I think the only thing I would think about that might be challenging from your developer story, which is, okay, how do you maybe think about what app you want people to use in what scenario?
Leo Laporte [01:28:27]:
There's been a lot of talk in the world about Mythos, which is an anthropic model. People are saying we'll be so good at finding security flaws. Well, anthropic saying we're not going to release it to the public. But only the 50 companies I think, I don't know if Apple's in that list. I know Microsoft is.
Andy Ihnatko [01:28:43]:
I think they were.
Leo Laporte [01:28:44]:
Yeah. Were they? So that they can find the flaws before the bad guys get access to this model and find it for them. And apparently two researchers with a company called Caliph have in fact used Mythos to find a flaw, a very rare flaw in Apple's very locked down operating system. And it used a technique that Mythos seems to have excluded exclusively compared to other frontier models, the ability to link exploits together. This is what real hackers do often to get these zero click exploits and others. The software they wrote links together two bugs and a handful of techniques to corrupt Mac's memory, then gain access to parts of the device that should be inaccessible. It's a privilege escalation exploit. So this is, is certainly proof that Bugmageddon is a coming.
Leo Laporte [01:29:42]:
Yeah, it's, there was a, there's a,
Andy Ihnatko [01:29:44]:
there was a. I don't have in front of me but a couple of weeks ago when this first like was when, when they first announced that hey, we got this thing, Mythos, we're putting in the hands of just some people to test it out to because it's too dangerous to put out in the, put out in the field. There's a, there's a company that, or there's, there's a source that does like benchmark testing for exploits. And they were able to give it a challenge of it was able to do a 30 step exploit and figure out all of its own just like you said, chaining together multiple different techniques, putting together a game plan for a start here end here with fully owning the device.
Leo Laporte [01:30:19]:
Researchers, the Wall Street Journal says were so excited about their discovery, they drove down to Apple.
Andy Ihnatko [01:30:24]:
Yeah, that's a cute picture.
Leo Laporte [01:30:28]:
They present their 55 page report to Apple. They're very proud of themselves. That's Bruce Deng and Tai Duong of Calif. They're waiting for Apple to patch it before they release details and Duong says the bugs will probably be fixed pretty quickly, but still a big deal that this AI was able to find a way into a map, one of the world's most secure operating systems.
Jason Snell [01:30:56]:
And Apple has, they've done, they've ratcheted up what they pay on their bug bounties. You know, obviously they're, you know, you're never going to beat a state actor or, or someone who sells to state actors for, for bounties. But if we talk about people who are kind of like on the good side, they are, they are paying more now, which is a good sign of the, of their focus on this. And, and you know, I love that, you know, they're out in Cupertino and seem excited to be there. That's kind of fun. Those guys get to come and present this to Apple and take their own.
Christina Warren [01:31:26]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:31:27]:
Take a picture and all of that stuff. That's a, that's kind of a. Because remember, I mean Apple could approach this as being like we don't want to talk about it. That I feel, I get the sense that Apple has changed its approach with security stuff where they used to basically say if we talk about security it makes people worry about our security so we'll just never say, say anything. And I feel like they've now come around to the idea that they need to communicate that they are an entity that lives in the world and has attackers and gets attacked and actually is more comfortable. Like I've literally been on three calls with people from Apple Security on background but like telling me how they feel about approaching security challenges and like they never would have done that before but they're so they're opening up and I think it's a good thing.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:13]:
They used to make that as a marketing thing where they say hey, oh, using Windows, enjoy all of your hacks and malware and stuff like that. Of course that doesn't happen at all on Macs. Like actually it did a lot, just not a whole lot. It's just that you're piddling little operating system that nobody cares about. And now it's like, yeah, actually people even care about. People store Bitcoin on the most piddling operating system. So yes,
Jason Snell [01:32:35]:
it's a badge of honor that the Mac is doing so well that it's also an attacker. Yeah, but, but I think they realize that There's a conversation that's happening and to ignore it and not, not talk, explain about what they're doing. I think they finally realize that they actually need to come and say we are making an effort to make, you know, the Mac not just iOS where it's a little bit easier for them, but the Mac more secure and that they're increasing their bug boundaries and they're doing all of that stuff instead of pretending like I don't know what you're talking about.
Andy Ihnatko [01:33:04]:
The thing is, the great thing about my town is that it's a simple old fashioned. We don't even lock our doors at night. Like that's okay. That's no longer something to brag about. It's no. We.
Leo Laporte [01:33:12]:
We should also mention that Foxconn has apparently been ransomware. Bad guys say they exfiltrated eight terabytes of information from Foxconn's North American factories. Foxconn of course, makes iPhone and I don't know, a lot of other Apple stuff. This isn't the first time Foxconn has been a ransomware, but this, you know, it's the latest. A couple other stories before we get our picks of the week. Epic Games, Fortnite back in the App Store finally Worldwide.
Andy Ihnatko [01:33:50]:
Yeah, they were in the Apple US App Store I think last year, but they had a very, very proud blog post. Oh, with the. Oh God, what was the actual headline? But it was like, like yes, now we're finally back in the App Store absolutely everywhere. And yeah, Fortnite is back on the App Store around the world as the final battle approaches. And I don't know. So there was also Apple and Epic like filed like a joint proffer to the court because now Apple is kind of in a bed now that they've had their contempt citations basically upheld by Everywhere. Now they are. Now they acknowledge that we have to come up with a new payment system.
Andy Ihnatko [01:34:31]:
Excuse me, a percentage of how much charge developers for outbound links that install stuff. And no, it can't be 27%. So basically they basically have. The two of them have an agreement that they gave to the judge not to solve the problem, but we've agreed that Apple in 45 days is going to give us a number. Not only are they going to give us a number, but they're going to give us, give us an explanation of how they came to the number. And they're also going to give us documentation and internal documents that support that number. We will then respond to that as a pretext to. We are going to have we're going to solve this problem so that Apple can, you know, get back to making money off the App Store, which now, because of the injunction, they really can't.
Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
Meta has a new app on the App Store called Instance and an Instagram feature for ephemeral sharing of photos. Kind of like snap, I guess, where the photos disappear after a while. Meta says it's a new way to
Christina Warren [01:35:28]:
show you can also save them. Yeah, you can also save them if you want to, like, I guess put in your stories and things like that later. So there is a way if you want to, you know, hold on to them or whatnot. I don't know. This is an interesting thing for me because this is an app and I saw a lot of people in my feed downloading it and using it, and I was just kind of like, why? No, I don't. I don't really have any.
Leo Laporte [01:35:46]:
Why are you doing that?
Christina Warren [01:35:47]:
Well, I don't know. Maybe it just says maybe about like where I am in my life. Maybe it just is more a state on like the. The Meta of it all. But I'm kind of like, if I wanted to send ephemeral photos, I'm not going to do it through Instagram. I have other ways of talking to people. If I just wanted to send them photos in the moment, you know, do
Leo Laporte [01:36:03]:
you just put them? I put them in messages.
Christina Warren [01:36:04]:
I was that. That's what I mean. So much of my social media has moved from being public.
Leo Laporte [01:36:09]:
Yeah.
Christina Warren [01:36:09]:
To being just in group chats and various messaging apps and Signal and imessage and, you know, wherever.
Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
Yep. I use Signal, WhatsApp, Apple's messages. And if I'm going to put a photo, send a photo, somebody, I'm just going to send it there. But you can now do it with instances. It starts in the camera when you use the app itself and it's free and it's already got 4.8 out of 5 stars on the App Store. So I guess people. People like it. What else? I think that's.
Leo Laporte [01:36:43]:
Oh, Spotify is going to support Apple's HLS streaming, which initially they only for video, which they only did on the Apple app. Now Spotify doing it means, I think more and more podcasts will probably support HLS streaming. As far as I can tell, the only advantage we're looking at it. We weren't going to do it if it was just Apple, but maybe if it becomes the standard format for video. I think one of the main virtues is you could be watching the video and then just go to audio Only, Right, right. Or vice versa.
Christina Warren [01:37:13]:
Yeah, I think that's one of the minutes. Isn't it supposed to also be like, more efficient? I think that's supposed to be one of the problems with the standards. It's supposed to be like more, more, you know, efficient from a broadband perspective. Which is obviously, I think probably why Apple initially supported it and why Spotify, now that they're serving so much video content, is probably looking at it too. And like, oh, okay, if we can cut our own bandwidth bills from all of this, that might be a good thing.
Leo Laporte [01:37:37]:
Right? All right, let's take a little break and then your picks of the week coming up next. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Pick of the week time. Let's start with Christina Warren.
Christina Warren [01:37:48]:
Yeah, so this is an app called Sentinel and it's by a guy whose name is Alan on, although his GitHub A L I N is his name and his website is, it's alana. Com. But if you search a sentinel macOS, you should be able to find the GitHub link to this. And what it basically is, is it's a GUI app that basically configures a gatekeeper. And this is, I'm going to be honest, from a security standpoint, you want to be careful when you're using this. You want to make sure that you're only using this for files that you know you can trust. But, but if you've ever run into that instance where you've downloaded an app that isn't signed by the App Store, isn't notarized, the gatekeeper comes up and says, or you have a file that says, I can't access this. The way that you would normally remove that from Gatekeeper would be to open up the terminal, type in XATTR minus D, then like the file name and then basically remove from quarantine.
Christina Warren [01:38:49]:
This will do that for you, where you can just drag an app or a file onto the GUI that the app has, which basically will basically let you access it. So you can allow the unsigned app to launch and then you can even sign the app with either your own certificate or with no certificate if you want to make sure that it'll open in the future. And so this is one that I just, I actually recommended it to a colleague earlier today and it reminded me of that and I was like, this is actually a really great app. It's for. And the developer, he also makes a really nice app called Pear Cleaner, which is an open source app cleaner that has privacy mining features involved. But yeah, Sentinel, if you've ever had to deal with, especially downloading apps from independent developers who might not have them signed all the times, or binaries that might come in other ways. Again, know what you're doing first, but I think this is a great way of not having to. To have the terminal open and know exactly what commands you need to type into the file.
Leo Laporte [01:39:51]:
Every time I have X attribute in my fingers, I type it so often I download so much stuff that I have to take out of quarantine. This will be a nice way. Just drag it to it. That's a great idea. Thank you, Christina. You can find it on the web or in our famous website mbwpicks.com you're looking for sentinel, the gatekeeper gui. I am going to create a sacrilege, a terrible, terrible picture. If you hate the Mac doc, wouldn't it be nice to turn it into the Windows XP or 98 menu?
Jason Snell [01:40:30]:
All boos boo.
Leo Laporte [01:40:33]:
I'm not gonna do it, but I
Jason Snell [01:40:35]:
just revealed the villain of the show.
Leo Laporte [01:40:38]:
It's hysterical. It's from a guy named Peng. Peng. It's called Retro Win. Bring the classic Windows taskbar back on Mac os. There are some, I think, probably useful reasons for this. And you can choose. This is the Windows 98 version.
Leo Laporte [01:40:54]:
This is the Windows XP version, the
Christina Warren [01:40:58]:
Vista version, or the Windows 7.
Leo Laporte [01:40:59]:
I guess it was Windows 7 version. There is no Windows 11 version, so don't get your hopes up, kids. He actually really kind of wrote it, which is cool. It's not just a skin, but it is free. I believe it is Retro Win. A Windows 98 XP7 taskbar. If the dock is driving you crazy, suffer no longer.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:27]:
Well, also, because there are a lot of people who are buying their parents and their grandparents replacing their old Windows machines with.
Leo Laporte [01:41:34]:
There you go.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:36]:
It's just. Just like the old crank.
Leo Laporte [01:41:38]:
I know how to use this. Andy, pick of the week.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:42]:
My pick is this common thing. This is, of course, an LED light bulb.
Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
Ah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:48]:
But it's a special light bulb because it is actually rechargeable.
Leo Laporte [01:41:51]:
Wait a minute. It's not even plugged in.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:54]:
It's not working. It has a USB C charging port.
Leo Laporte [01:41:58]:
That's hysterical.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:59]:
And also, see, the bottom is actually just. This is a dummy thing. It's just magnetically connected.
Leo Laporte [01:42:05]:
So. So it gets no power from. From the socket.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:08]:
Exactly. No power from the socket. This is just like a dummy. The point of this little fixture is that if you have an old lamp that you actually really, really like, but you want to put it in a place where there isn't an outlet and you don't use it. You can basically screw this into the same fixture or screw it into the wall. But also that's kind of cool. It's magnetic. So it also comes with like peel and stick little metal tabs so that I've got a couple of these tabs under, under, under a shelf that again, I access a lot.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:34]:
It's not worth running power too. There's also the. If you want, if you want to like flaunt it. There's also like a little strap that
Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
you can hang it around your neck. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:44]:
Christmas tree or whatever.
Jason Snell [01:42:46]:
It's.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:46]:
It's the thing. This is just a nice little like again, no name sort of thing. It has multiple modes, different colors. You can also set the brightness level. It comes with a remote so you can do it via ir. And again, it's not. It's not a immensely wonderful piece of technology.
Leo Laporte [01:43:03]:
How long does the battery last?
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:05]:
I've been finding it lasts about five to six hours.
Leo Laporte [01:43:07]:
That's pretty good because.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:09]:
So for me it is. Again, there's a closet. There's a closet. It's not worth running power to. I've got a bookshelf that again, not worth running power to or snaking up like LEDs up there. I just put again, little self stick piece of metal there. I've got this clapped up there and I can simply flick it on, get what I would need and then flick it back off again. And they're cheap.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:30]:
They're like on Amazon. Again you can get these from all kinds of different sources. This happens to be called the Brighttown E26 rechargeable light bulb. But they're two for 20 bucks. As a matter of fact, after I got my first two, I actually bought like four more because I just found them so useful. It would be terrible if it only lasted like an hour and a half, two hours. It'd be terrible if they didn't throw off very much light. It's about as bright as about a 40 watt light bulb, but they're very, very use.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:54]:
And it's not micro USB. It is again USB 3. And for all those reasons, again, a nice tidy solution to a problem that was not worth solving until I could solve it for just 10 bucks and so easily.
Leo Laporte [01:44:07]:
It's waterproof. That's cool. I have not tried that yet, but that's really cool. All right. Very cool. Bright Town 19 for $20 for two of them.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:18]:
Probably good for cosplay too.
Leo Laporte [01:44:19]:
Yeah, yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:21]:
Nice dramatic storytelling.
Leo Laporte [01:44:23]:
Just. Yes. Put them down Your pants. And everybody will wonder.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:26]:
And they're on the. Hanging on the hood.
Jason Snell [01:44:29]:
It was his own face.
Christina Warren [01:44:30]:
What?
Leo Laporte [01:44:33]:
Jason Snell. Wrap it up with your pick of the week.
Jason Snell [01:44:35]:
I have a free Mac utility Vibe coded by our friend Glenn Fleischman because he saw a need. And it comes after a bunch of how to articles about how people sometimes let their Mac hard drive fill up too far. And there is such a thing as too close to full. And the Mac starts to freak out when your hard drive is too full. And so he created this little app. It is called Mr. Plimsoul. You can get it at Mr.
Jason Snell [01:45:02]:
Plimsoul's.
Leo Laporte [01:45:03]:
What's the name from?
Jason Snell [01:45:05]:
Well, if you scroll down to the bottom Leo, you will see Plimsoll Mark is the load line painted on a ship's hull. The limit past which you can't safely add more weight without risking the boat because there is is such a thing as too full. What Mr. Plimsoll does is it sits in your menu bar and you, you
Christina Warren [01:45:23]:
can say the most Glenn name ever.
Jason Snell [01:45:25]:
It is, it is the most Glenn name, but it's great. I mean, names are hard and it, it warns you when your hard drive, any of the hard drives you choose to monitor is too full and you choose how close to too full it is. Well, like I have this on my Raid because when my RAID gets above like 90%, I probably should rethink my life about why I'm saving all of those old videos, right? So, and it will. How does it notify you? Because like if it's on a server, that's not very helpful. If it just puts up a push notification or whatever, it will send you an email. It will send you. If it's on a. It will send you an imessage.
Jason Snell [01:46:01]:
It will send you something via pushover. I think he's working on a, on a, on a web hook version of it. So there's lots of ways to let you know, hey, this hard drive is filling up, which is a real thing that you don't want to have happen. Or just let it live in your menu bar and look up there and you can click and it'll say, oh, you know, you've got, you're only at 70%, you're okay. It actually serves a very simple need with a very simple thing. And then, and then the text messaging thing is really amazing. So since it runs on the Mac, like if you put it on a server, it'll open messages and send you from you a little text that says Mr. Plimsoll says this hard drive is filling up.
Jason Snell [01:46:40]:
Really great idea. It's not really. It's project managed by Glenn and coded by Claude, I believe. But it works great. I actually have it on my server now.
Leo Laporte [01:46:51]:
Nothing wrong with that. And that makes it free.
Jason Snell [01:46:55]:
It's free. It will not track you. It will not track you. It will not ask for money. It is just to help you. And that's pretty cool too.
Leo Laporte [01:47:04]:
Mr. Plimsell. Mrplimsel app for the free. Mr. Plimsol. Let's see. Launch menu. Yes, launch it, show it in doc.
Leo Laporte [01:47:15]:
No critical override at 95%. Yes. There you go. And then you can choose a notification. This is great.
Jason Snell [01:47:22]:
And it just lives up there and says, hey, right now, Macintosh HD 68%. I'm doing great. I don't have to worry about it.
Leo Laporte [01:47:32]:
Very cool. Thank you, Jason. Jason Snell. Six colors calm. And if you want to know what podcasts he does, he does a lot of them. Sixcolors.com Jason Yep. Any incomparables coming up?
Jason Snell [01:47:45]:
There's always one, I would say. Over at the Incomparable network, Dan Moran and I are continuing to talk about the current just about to end fifth season of For All Mankind on Apple TV on a podcast we call NASA Vending Machine for reasons. And the fun thing is next week it rolls straight into Star City, which is their new show that's a spinoff. It's set in the Soviet Union in the late 60s and early 70s. The Soviet space program has landed the first man on the moon because it's set in the For All Mankind universe. What will they do next? And also like, there's lots of KGB spy stuff in it. And I can tell you, having seen the first four episodes of that show, show, it's great. So check that out.
Jason Snell [01:48:27]:
And NASA Vending Machine is a place to get all your For All Mankind and Star City podcast thoughts.
Leo Laporte [01:48:32]:
Very nice. Thank you, Jason, Andy and Otko.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:38]:
I have two things to clear the backlog and I have to clear the backlog. There are people that I owe a debt of gratitude to that have to be attended to. And I did not finish over the weekend.
Leo Laporte [01:48:47]:
Did you turn the lights off in the library? It seems like it's dark for effect.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:51]:
Exactly. So you can see the.
Leo Laporte [01:48:52]:
Oh, the, the light bulbs. Yes. Look at that. That's Mrs. Plimsoll. She's excited. Thank you, Andrew. And of course the wonderful Christina Warren.
Leo Laporte [01:49:03]:
She's FilmGirl, Film Girl, Developer Relations at GitHub. Anything you would like to mention? Do you do other Podcasts.
Christina Warren [01:49:11]:
I do. So I have a show that we don't do it as frequently as we should called Overtired. Overtiredpod.com I love that, That I do with Brett Trobstra and Jeff Severance Gunzel and yeah, that's, that's, that's the other, the only other thing I'm doing right now. I used to do more. Maybe I'll, I'll bring another one back someday that's more culture related. We'll see.
Leo Laporte [01:49:30]:
We thought we were watching Google I O and they talked about how you could have your agent Spark notify you when there's a new sneaker drop. And I thought of you.
Christina Warren [01:49:39]:
Oh, yes, I thought of you.
Leo Laporte [01:49:41]:
Do you still do the sneakers?
Christina Warren [01:49:42]:
Not so much. I got to the point, I got, I kind of realized, I was like, I think I have enough shoes. But if there is a there. But if there is like a.
Leo Laporte [01:49:50]:
You only have two feet, young lady.
Christina Warren [01:49:52]:
Right. And, and when I looked and I was like, I have like 20 pairs that I have like in storage because I don't have room for the boxes that I've never worn, I was like, maybe, maybe it's a little bit too much. But, but when really cool, you know, sneakers come out, I'm obviously always gung
Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
ho, have too many shoes.
Christina Warren [01:50:09]:
I mean, I don't know. Carrie Radshaw would disagree with, she would agree with you. She, she, she would disagree with me. But I, I, I think I did get to the point where I was like, maybe I have too many sneakers.
Leo Laporte [01:50:18]:
Yeah, yeah, that happens. You know, you, you outgrow your hobbies for new ones.
Christina Warren [01:50:22]:
Well, you know, and you, but you also never know when the hyper fixation is going to come back. Right? So I'm always, I'm always open to that because the hyper fixation can always just grab you back when you release expecting it.
Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
I know all about that. Trust me. Well, that wraps it up for MacBreak Weekly. Security Now just around the corner. I appreciate, appreciate those of you watching live your patience. We started a little late due to Google I/O, but I think we got you all out of here in a prompt fashion. Normally we'll do MacBreak Weekly on a Tuesday around 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club. In the club.
Leo Laporte [01:50:57]:
Twit, Discord. Of course, everybody's welcome to watch on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick after the fact on demand versions of the show at twit.tv/mbw. And we do have audio and video so. So you can choose your platform. Of course, club members can also get chapter markers. Now, isn't that exciting? There is a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly. And of course, the best way to get it is to subscribe. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available, and then you don't have to think about it.
Leo Laporte [01:51:28]:
You just know. I've got a MacBreak Weekly to listen to of a Tuesday evening. Thanks for being here, everybody. Now, I'm sorry to say it as my second sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time. So see you next week.
