MacBreak Weekly 1050 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Yes, I'm back. Jason and Christina have the week off, but good news, Matthew Casinelli is here and he is the only person in the world who can explain what Apple is up to with the new Intents for Siri AI. He will explain all. We'll also talk about all the new hardware and a lot more. MacBreak Weekly is next.

Leo Laporte [00:00:26]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1050, recorded Tuesday, November 10th, 2026. Building 19. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. Hello everybody. Yes, I'm back. Thanks to our wonderful hosts for filling in, Micah Sargent, et cetera, et cetera. Jason Snell decided, heck with it, I'm not coming back.

Leo Laporte [00:00:54]:
So he's gone for the week. I don't know where he is. Is he on vacation? I don't know what he's doing. Christina Warren, on vacation. You know who's here? Andy Ihnatko. He's always here. You can't get rid of him. You don't, you don't go on vacations.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:06]:
I'm like, I'm, I'm like, I have a combination of like tenure and I belong to a strong union. It's like there's no way unless, unless I volunteer to leave, there's no getting me out of this.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
No, we love it. We love it. So glad you're here, Andy, from the library. Uh, filling in for Christina, we got the Doctor of Rock, Doc Rock. John Boyd.

Doc Rock [00:01:26]:
If I get to be CW, I am winning. Period.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Point blank. What's BCW?

Doc Rock [00:01:32]:
No, I said if I get to be, like to be, not to be CW, AKA Christina.

Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
Got it. You are CW.

Doc Rock [00:01:38]:
I've called her C-dub since my, uh,

Leo Laporte [00:01:40]:
C-dub,

Doc Rock [00:01:41]:
2, 2 Odd Days when we were at 2 Odd back in the day.

Leo Laporte [00:01:43]:
I call her— oh yeah, were you both at 2 Odd?

Doc Rock [00:01:46]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
The ultimate Apple weblog.

Doc Rock [00:01:48]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
I didn't know that. So you go way back with Christina.

Doc Rock [00:01:51]:
I'm all mold.

Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Filament girl.

Doc Rock [00:01:53]:
I am.

Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
And also here, Matthew Castanelli. We're always glad to have Matthew on the show. He is at supercomputer.tech, longtime, uh, he was a host on our home automation show with Micah Sargent and is a longtime friend of the network. And last time you were on was on Intelligent Machines talking about Siri AI, and there has been a big breaking story in Siri AI this week.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:02:17]:
Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me.

Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
Oh yes. I saw people like you going very happy, going very excited.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:02:24]:
Going ham on Twitter.

Leo Laporte [00:02:25]:
27— iOS 27.3 is going to open Siri AI to apps. Tell me what's happening.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:02:34]:
Sure. Um, the— they're expanding beyond the limited version that they basically announced 2 years ago. Siri domains, which is like Apple knows how to do calendars and notes and reminders very well, but if you make a cat tracking app, it doesn't know what cats are automatically when you add it to Siri and things like that. Right. So they're still, uh, part of what's interesting is they're still keeping those domains, but they're adding the ability to add just like a, it's called like a tool intent tag to your actions for your apps, and people will be able to add— it's custom actions for— and custom content from your apps will work with Siri rather than— it isn't as good as the domains. So that is one thing. They did some, uh, developer group labs and talked about everything, and she's still smarter with the domains. Like, she can still understand a little bit better.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:03:32]:
And there's things like you have to use the app name. If it's not part of the domains. So there are like some limitations, but it goes from like Siri can only do support some apps to anything anybody comes up with works. I'm assuming they'll add more domains over time, but it is a thing that now— So you're gonna have to explain— We don't have to wait till next year to get to Siri, which is—

Leo Laporte [00:03:54]:
You're gonna have to explain to me— Sure, I'll go through it all. What's a domain versus intents? Is it, are they related?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:04:00]:
It's basically like a category of intents that Siri already knows about.

Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
So intents, as I understand it, are something as a developer of an app that you're putting on an iOS device, you say, I would like to be able to access the camera. And so you say that in an app intent, and then Apple gives you permission to do that. Is that roughly—

Matthew Cassinelli [00:04:22]:
Not necessarily. That's more like— those sound more like entitlements. And I'm also like, I don't—

Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
I can understand why I might confuse domains, intents, and entitlements.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:04:31]:
No, totally. I was just going to say that they actually, in this announcement, I noticed their language. They said custom actions and custom content. That's the, like, essentially layman's version of their engineering speak, which is intents and entities. It's like, all it means is if you need it— in Shortcuts they're called actions— but it's like, if you're trying to do something, what are you intending to do? The intent of, like, an app is like, here's all the things that I can do, here's all the intents that I have available. And then Siri can look at that.

Leo Laporte [00:05:03]:
You register that with the operating system.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:05:06]:
Yeah, like, you— when you put it on the App Store, you have your set of intents, and Siri can understand immediately what your app can do.

Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
So why is this a big deal? Was this unexpected?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:05:16]:
Um, I mean, I think the biggest deal is that it didn't happen next September and it's now happening this year instead of next,

Leo Laporte [00:05:24]:
right?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:05:24]:
But like, I think the biggest problem with the Siri domains is that it's like, this is great, but it's limited. So we're all gonna have to wait another 12 months to get for any app out there. It's like in that timeline where you like might get like literal superintelligence and then Siri still can't understand like custom apps or something like that. So—

Leo Laporte [00:05:46]:
So if I'm a ChatGPT, what does that do for me if I'm on, on an iPhone with ChatGPT or, or GrokBot or whatever? Does this give me new capabilities?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:05:56]:
I mean, with those apps, those agents, not necessarily right now. What it does prove is that it's the same sort of like competence that those have with working with tools. Siri can work with them in the same way. Instead, like what they announced 2 years ago and what they just shipped in the fall is kind of just like, hey, I can understand this and then go over here and do this. But if it's like, I didn't figure it out, she's not going to like go check a different source, do all these other steps. So she's—

Leo Laporte [00:06:28]:
Is this a step toward, uh, agent— agentic Siri? Absolutely. Because that's what people are wondering about. Right now you got Muse or you got Grokbot, or there are all of these agents which people love, seem to love, and they do a lot of stuff for you. They operate in the background. And I always thought that the reason Apple put a Siri app on the iPhone was to have that kind of capability. At first they had said no app, and they changed their mind towards the end. where we're headed?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:06:58]:
I definitely think— I mean, I saw some of the rumors that that's what is gonna come next year at least, but it's definitely been since they invented the App Intents technology in 2022, like, they've had that capability to do that with your apps. They didn't have the intelligence part on top. They've had all the pipelines set up and they've been kind of perfecting it for like 5 years, so I think that's the thing that's like, people are like, what is Apple doing with intelligence? And it's like, they have all the hooks into the apps. Like I've been waiting for, I literally became a developer consultant 'cause I was the Shortcuts guy and I was sick of waiting for people to add actions and not do it. So I was like, I might as well help them do it directly because I'm sitting here waiting for these things.

Leo Laporte [00:07:45]:
So what does this mean for Shortcuts? Is this where you see— Oh,

Matthew Cassinelli [00:07:47]:
it's incredible.

Leo Laporte [00:07:48]:
It's incredible. So this is where you'd see it. Uh, users will see it at first, isn't it?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:07:52]:
I mean, it depends if you're a Shortcuts person already. Like Siri will just be a lot smarter. And, but in Shortcuts, you can look at the sets of actions from your apps and kind of see who's supporting what. It's not all directly tied into Siri. There's, they can like pick and choose a little bit. So it's not one-to-one. And if it's not in Shortcuts, it's not in Siri. There's a little bit of confusion there, but It still means that for— if someone's like Shortcuts, all your apps will get tons of actions because they're all sitting there supporting the Siri stuff and it's the same technology under the hood.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:08:27]:
Um, the App Intents thing powers Shortcuts actions, Siri intents. It's all the kind of the same technology. Like very literally, when you— when I design them for developers, I'm thinking of what the Shortcuts action looks like. Right. And then that same thing is what Siri's just kind of checking.

Leo Laporte [00:08:45]:
So what does it look like in the Shortcuts app? Do we necessarily have now a whole bunch of more things that we can choose from?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:08:50]:
You should have, um, I mean, there's a limit. They said that Siri things have like a limit of 40 action intents in general per app. So like, uh, yeah, so, but that in my experience, there's, um, I've kind of have a framework for how to develop them and people don't have more than like 4 to 5 types of content. 40-some-odd. Yeah, like that's generally sufficient.

Leo Laporte [00:09:14]:
Is this like an MCP server? What is—

Matthew Cassinelli [00:09:16]:
100%. That's exactly the same metaphor. Like Apple did this before MCP even existed. But MCP is a much more broad and like, it's basically like agnostic, whereas this is only what Apple's platform. That's also like the company that I started is trying to help you do both at the same time because it's, Otherwise you're kind of doing the same thing with MCP that you are with App Intents. Um, my—

Leo Laporte [00:09:42]:
I think there's a lot of mystery. Doc, do the people, did the people at Ecamm go, oh wow, we can't wait to use this? Or are people going, I don't, what is it? What does it mean?

Doc Rock [00:09:52]:
Well, I can, I can see totally for us some of the things that would come into play with Siri if we can find a way to do it. So when we first decided that we wanted to add Shortcuts capability, that was a conversation that I had with Matt and I spoke to Ken and Glenn about some of the things you could do. And their first initial reaction is, oh, what are some things that people could do? And I'm like, well, I'm gonna start my show. I want you to send posts to, at that time it was Little Bluebird. I can send posts to Twitter. Automatically. I can tell, you know, the iCloud management daemon, daemon, I don't know why I said daemon, turn to turn off. I could tell, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:10:32]:
You better say it right. We got Daniel Suarez on Thursday.

Doc Rock [00:10:35]:
Yeah, I'm saying, I'm not trying to get—

Leo Laporte [00:10:37]:
I don't know if it says daemon or demon, but I'll find out. Yeah. I'm not trying to get beat up.

Doc Rock [00:10:40]:
And then, you know, you wanted to have like, uh, Adobe, uh, Cloud back, you know, back in stop, Backblaze to pause. And you could do all of that from Shortcuts. So when you start a stream, it would tell your network to kind of chill out. You know, I locked the front door, changed the lights, the whole 9 yards. So now in these situations, especially with the ability to build Shortcuts by talking to it, I've had mixed results so far, but I can only see it getting better. I could even do things like, I'm planning to do a livestream next week. I'm gonna have Matt on, send him an email, ask for his headshot and bio, like the whole 9 yards. yards, and I can say guest request as a shortcut, and it automatically just pops up a thing.

Doc Rock [00:11:17]:
What's the guest's name and email address? I'd fill that in or voice it in with Speechify or WhisperFlow, hit a button, and it goes and it does all of that admin stuff for me, and it would make my job easier. And I'm already teaching people to build. Yeah.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:11:30]:
For Ecamm though, what, and I, I totally just, I have to, because we're talking about it literally on the show. It's like, what I would want from you is Every— a good way to think about it for Mac apps is the entire menu bar is a set of intents that you already have for your Mac app.

Doc Rock [00:11:46]:
Yes.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:11:46]:
And so just being able to like switch the profile, there should be a switch profile intent that's available in Actions and then, or in Shortcuts. And then you can just say to Siri, like, switch to my gaming profile and it'll, it can then go into Ecamm and change the control for you. So, so like, that's what actually happens.

Doc Rock [00:12:06]:
Yeah, see, that stuff is incredible.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:12:07]:
You could have like 150 intents of every single single, like sound levels, camera effects. I'm looking at it right now. Overlays, sound effects. Every part of that app could be controlled through app intent. Like you would, your problem would be that you have too much and that you would only want to focus on the key things that people would literally do with their voice. Because like the other, the part with Mac apps is just like, I don't know about you guys, but I don't ever use Siri on the Mac. It is Spotlight All also now. Yeah.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:12:36]:
Oh my God. So that's the major difference. I still think something like Ecamm is like, if you made that whole set of tools of— I don't know, it's harder now. I think this is still the same thing of like, in reality, it wouldn't be worth it until they allow more than 40 tools. Because otherwise what I would really want is like, hey, I, I think I want to do a gaming stream and you should set up my overlays this way and my camera effects this way. And she would be able to like Identify the sets of intents that you have available and then chain them together and do them agentically like other, other tools are doing.

Doc Rock [00:13:12]:
Yeah. What, what Jon did before the show, this is a perfect example. What Jon did before the show is like, hey Siri, go out and double-check that Andy is still where Andy is and Matt is still where Matt is, docs. And then compare those to what I have set up for the lower thirds. It would totally be able to do that. One, based off your internet search, but based off of the context Our contacts are in Leo's phone and Leo's computer, so they could just double-check everything and we won't, you know, spell your name wrong with a single L, or God knows everybody spells Andy's name wrong, but you know what I mean? So like the, the ability to do that would just be amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:13:47]:
The thing that's

Matthew Cassinelli [00:13:47]:
great,

Leo Laporte [00:13:49]:
I think I was misunderstanding. I was getting excited cuz I thought, oh, this'll make my AIs more capable because I have all sorts of AI, local AI and GrokBot and Muse and all that stuff. more capable. And it doesn't quite work that way. It makes Siri more capable, right?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:14:05]:
I mean, in, in theory, all of those platforms could adopt App Intents and let Siri call, like, find my conversations in ChatGPT and reply to them.

Leo Laporte [00:14:17]:
Right.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:14:17]:
I think the reality of, like, competition is I don't think any of them are going to do that. And it's a—

Leo Laporte [00:14:24]:
This is Apple more responding to them than anything else, right? This is Apple saying we want to own this.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:14:29]:
Maybe. I mean, I worked at Workflow and Apple bought that company 10 years ago. So like, it isn't— I think the way that they're shifting Siri towards being more agentic is following the patterns of the AI industry. But I don't— I think it's— Apple's always had this position, and I think they've always been very wary of going way too far with AI before it was ready. And then now it's like, Well, I don't know. I especially— it's been very true. Like this summer I was like, we have, we have AI, like it's all here. I'm doing it on this platform.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:15:04]:
Why can't I do it on Apple's platform? We're, we're now getting there. Whether or not they're like all sharing hooks is like, it's, there is the nature of competition and just like integration. Apple alone can't even get developers to adopt it yet. So like giving it off to ChatGPT, but at the same time they have the same Um, I'm trying to think of the— Gatekeeper isn't the right technology. That's the EU part, but they have the handoff system where it can— you could be able to plug Claude in and it could run App Intents. And there, there's even on the Mac, somebody, uh, found a version of if you like right-clicked on Spotlight, you could reveal that you could use Claude instead of Apple Intelligence.

Leo Laporte [00:15:47]:
Oh, interesting.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:15:47]:
But it's still going through Siri. rather than Claude now having like direct access. I mean, it still wouldn't even be direct because App Intents isn't that direct, but it is— they're like, no, we're not just going to give you full access to everyone's data on all their devices because it would be a nightmare. Like, right, the— already some of the stuff with that people are doing with Apple's like iMessages databases feel sketchy, but at the same time in App Intents, there's just a find messages action. See, this is designed for it.

Leo Laporte [00:16:21]:
Apple might miss the boat on this because right now I can have Grokbot look at my Apple Messages database and send and receive Apple Messages. It scans them. I don't know Apple wants them to do that.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:16:30]:
Yeah, I mean, that's still pretty like, who knows what special tech is going on. Apple could turn that off. Yeah, there is a level of trusting that, that I even like the way that just because you can do it in Shortcuts, you can you can do it is an important part. Like it is your data and you have the controls in there, which is great. And those other tools don't let you do that. You have to fully hand it off to these guys and be like, you do every part. Like I love that Shortcuts is automation and it also like I can repeat 1,000 times and do something and it's not gonna stop and be like, sorry, you ran out of usage with your computer.

Leo Laporte [00:17:06]:
And it's using local models or is it also using the cloud?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:17:08]:
It can do both. I mean, Siri, well Siri AI is, There's a little bit of local. Like if you just say like— It's not a whole lot. Open an app, it should be faster. But then there's also, yeah, no, it uses private cloud compute. They have like private cloud compute plus now as a, or maybe pro, I don't remember, is just like more powerful. It can do more. So like it is actually, that part's been essentially sufficient for what, you would want for like basic text summarization, like the tasks that she needs to do with the AI that she had has been fine.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:17:46]:
But I think it's all the coordination around it. I mean, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:17:52]:
I have a male voice for my Siri.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:17:53]:
Yeah, that's fair. I have an Aussie one on it. It just depends on the device. But, um, a lot of that is— it's easier to— it's much better at coordinating those things. There is also very basic memory now of like, if you asked it something last week and you ask the same question, it's like, I already— it doesn't— I already told you that. She just gets no— no, um, it's a— it'll just remember that you already asked that and kind of add to that context. And then it's even— there's tea leaves of deeper memory like all those other tools have that's like, you said this thing 6 months ago and it like— I, I don't know exactly how it goes since it hasn't been out yet, but it'll just be able to hold on to better contacts.

Leo Laporte [00:18:36]:
27.3, is that out in beta now? Can people try it in beta or is it not yet?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:18:40]:
Yeah, the one twist is you can't test a third-party app's Siri integration. They only allow it for internal TestFlight testers.

Leo Laporte [00:18:50]:
Okay.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:18:51]:
So like, but I would say, I actually thought of this, if you want to like volunteer to help your developers test these and be part of their Discord groups or whatever. And they, I mean, I'm sure developers need testing, but it's not, it's this, it's not like you can join Instagram's TestFlight and get their Siri access or anything.

Leo Laporte [00:19:10]:
Yeah. Well, I have a little app that I've been on vacation. I wrote a little, I wanted basically to do GrokBot with my own local AI. So I wrote a little LeoBot and it's a TestFlight app on iOS. So I could, in theory, if I understood it, And I've asked Claude to explain it to me and it doesn't understand. I could in theory take advantage of this. I gave it all the documentation and said, huh, okay.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:19:33]:
Yeah. I mean, it's, that's good to hear. It means I still have a job. You still have a job. For a little while. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:19:40]:
Maybe Fable 5.2 will understand.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:19:41]:
Yeah. No, it's, um, actually I will say Apple added better like Siri evaluations and Siri testing stuff in Xcode directly. So They are sort of, it is surprising that they're doing well on keeping Xcode as like a place that you should build if you're making apps for Apple platforms, because it'll just, it just understands how to make Apple apps where all those are like looking up from everybody else's public versions.

Leo Laporte [00:20:08]:
Andy, is this, uh, is this a compelling pitch from Apple or is it too little too late? Can they get into this agentic thing? Mark Gurman's story, Apple CEO presses software chief to pursue more ambitious AI strategy. They want to turn it, says Gurman, into a true agent. In fact, some have said Craig Federighi might be on his way out because he's not ambitious enough. Yeah?

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:32]:
I don't know about that. I mean, that's— there's rumors, then there's gossip, and that sounded to me like gossip. But nonetheless, Apple is still in the same position that they've been for the past 3 or 4 years, for good or for bad, which is that We can have a long 20-minute conversation about what scaffolding we're going to use and what agents we're going to use and how we're going to connect this to that. And if we want to run local AI, but that's a level way, way, way above what the average user actually wants. They want, they want things like what Doc was talking about, meaning that when I'm getting, when I'm getting set up for the show, I want to, I would much rather be opening up a chatbot and say, make sure that my audio input is the same as it usually is. Make sure that my Zoom settings are correct. correct, and then do a test, do a speed test to make sure that I'm connected to the right, uh, whatever, and set these things up for me. Until that happens, this is all stuff that Apple needs to get ready, get the runway ready and get the airplane ready so that they can take off.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:27]:
I mean, the thing, the problem that they're facing is that they, they have to do something that is very non-Apple. One of the things that I— Right. One of the things that I like about, uh, one of the biggest disadvantages of Android and other platforms and other hardware makers is that they're willing to say, you know what, there's a lot that we don't know right now, but there are a lot of people who want it right now and they're willing to accept a degraded experience. Let's just ship it and figure it out as we go along together. Even if they don't actually say that, Apple is in a position where even the best AI agents that I have used, I will try it once, twice, or 3 times and then stop using it because it will almost do what I asked it to do. Yeah, that's frustrating. And the effort that I have to put in to double-check its work is equal to to or larger than the effort that I would require to actually do all this stuff myself. And until they get this, so Apple will have to be content with saying, you know what, it's not gonna work for everything.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:21]:
This is not, we are not responsible for every step of this process. We are responsible for, we are the integration between all of these different AI models. We are the integration between all of these different apps with their intents and you, the user. And until 2033 maybe runs around, we can't promise that this is going to be as good as highlighting some text selecting boldface from a menu and gosh darn it, hey, look, the, the text went into boldface.

Doc Rock [00:22:49]:
You know, one thing that's really key here, and AI is very right about AI. I'm sorry, I had to. Sorry, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:56]:
Starting to get used to it.

Leo Laporte [00:22:57]:
AI, you're right about AI. Yeah.

Doc Rock [00:22:59]:
Yeah. Uh, Andreessen Horowitz and backup data coming from PNC and Bank of America says that roughly 4.5%, Bank of America says 3%. We'll give them that, um, that standard deviation, only basically 4% of us are paying for AI. That means 96% of us are still on free plans and aren't really using it. So where Andy is correct, I think the people that are willing to wait for Apple to do it are willing to wait for it based on the foundation that Apple has been very good about privacy so far, regardless of the unnecessary hootenanny about the damn Journal app this week. which I legit wanted to throw my brand new iPhone 18 Pro Max across the room because of something that I was watching on YouTube and the guy was just making up the wildest shenanigans. My local news people called me and asked me what I thought and I'm like, nah fam, this is absolute BS. Like, you know, Apple lives and dies on they're not giving away your stuff.

Doc Rock [00:24:08]:
The couple mistakes that they have made, they fell right on the sword, you know, committed Hello Kitty right away, blade in the back. Like, sorry. Sorry, it's, it's Hottie Kitty. I don't know how to speak Japanese.

Leo Laporte [00:24:18]:
Hello Kitty is good. Yeah, I like it.

Doc Rock [00:24:19]:
Hello Kitty's better.

Leo Laporte [00:24:20]:
A little less bloody. Yeah.

Doc Rock [00:24:21]:
Put the sword straight in the blade. Listen, my bad. Let's get this straightened out. And I appreciate the fact that they're going into this the way gringos go to Mexico and lightly kiss a pepper before they bite it to make sure that we're doing it the way that our 96% want. The myselfs and the Leos and the Mads of the world, you know, it's not for us. We get to go crazy, do what we want. We're making the most noise about where Apple is lacking. But I just spent the last week with my sister who's 5 years older than me, and she's not missing a thing.

Leo Laporte [00:24:58]:
No,

Doc Rock [00:24:58]:
she's not missing anything.

Leo Laporte [00:24:59]:
She just wants dictation on Siri to be good.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:25:01]:
I feel like—

Doc Rock [00:25:02]:
thank you. That's all she wants.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:03]:
There's also the other— well, the other thing is that we don't— we also don't know when AI will get— and agents will get sophisticated enough that we can really let it have— really let it loose on something. And I'm not even talking about like the trust factor. A good friend of mine, Barbara Thompson, has a Substack. She's ex-NASA. She's literally a rocket scientist. And she came up with an analogy that is so good that I have to force myself to remember, make sure you credit Barbara Thompson. This is too clever for you to have come up with. But she put up a post this summer called The Paint That Never Dries, in which she talks about, again, And just to give context, she was senior management at NASA, and a lot of her job was integrating all these basic technologies into how NASA can accomplish the things it wants to do.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:48]:
So she— that's her operational perspective from it. And she says that one of the most important things to remember about artificial intelligence is to think about it like you're painting a room. The actual putting paint on the walls takes you almost no time. The effort takes— the effort in the paint job is making sure that you mask off all the places where the paint is not supposed to go. Yeah, yeah. And AI is exactly same way. A lot of the work is going to be AI. I don't want you to touch this at all.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:12]:
Here's what I— here's where I want to apply AI, and here's where I need to keep AI completely out of the picture. And that's the status of the technology right now, and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. So that's, that's something that we're all going to have to figure out.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:26:28]:
With Apple, I think that's why in particular I've been so excited about App Intents this whole time, is it is It's— they've taped off every hole. Shortcuts is beautiful. And they really went through and it's like, if it does anything destructive, it will prompt you every time and will never just do that and destroy your information. It doesn't have file system access and things like that where it can like literally delete your drive or something like that. It's nowhere near that level. It is like approved paths across apps and like a information superhighway type of thing that it can all just interconnect, but it's still the developer is control— is in control of what is available. And then the user also has access in a way that you don't with other tools. Like, that is still really cool.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:27:19]:
Leo, what you were saying about making your own app is like, I think that's the, the power of Apple's platform really comes down to beyond the OS. It's the developers and all the apps that you already want to use and trust. And also the devices, that's like the HomeView that you'll get, can work with, you can make an app and have it support Siri on that. Yeah. And have all the Siri experience.

Leo Laporte [00:27:41]:
I'm actually excited about that. I ordered a HomeView just because I think it might be an interesting interface to AI. Totally. So, but this sounds like something—

Doc Rock [00:27:50]:
I kind of want one, Leo. Stop me from spending $200.

Leo Laporte [00:27:54]:
No, it's crazy. Go on Friday.

Doc Rock [00:27:56]:
It's like $300, $300.

Leo Laporte [00:27:57]:
Makes no sense.

Doc Rock [00:27:58]:
And again, like—

Leo Laporte [00:28:00]:
Don't do it. Don't do it.

Doc Rock [00:28:01]:
It's, it's one of these things, and I agree with you. Like, I would love to be able to walk past, um, the monopole with a screen and just be like, hey, um, I, you know, my sister-in-law just called me and told me today, okay, you're picking up Emma from school, right? I wanna be in the house, hands doing something, you know, I got my coffee going, whatever, making some ramen. Just roll past the screen and be like, hey, um, can you double-check what time, you know, Nana wanted me to pick up Emma? and like have her be able to say something or do something. You know, I want to be reminded when, you know, uh, let me know when Andy publishes something that I need to read. Like, you know what I'm into. Like, if he's talking about the fracturing in the Marvel Universe and, or if Andy writes a piece on Vision Quest, let me know. I don't, you know what I mean?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:28:48]:
What, in a technical way, what you're asking for is like app triggers for And content automations.

Doc Rock [00:28:54]:
For the things that, that actually make a difference.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:28:56]:
But we could totally get that next year. Like, that's, this is what's cool about the technology. Knowing about it is like, that's so feasible relative to 10 years ago, the way Apple siloed every, everything with silos. Like, we are at the exact opposite of that framework that we used to have. So it really is like a huge paradigm shift in the fact that that kind of experience can be possible.

Doc Rock [00:29:21]:
Real quick. Andy, before you say this, I just got to give one time to Professor X. Xavier, man, you're a legend. Absolute legend. I'm never really— this is crazy— I'm never really moved by celebrities passing or whatever. But Patrick is different. So like—

Leo Laporte [00:29:39]:
Oh, yeah.

Doc Rock [00:29:40]:
That one actually hit where the brakes— I'm a Marvel diehard. So that one hit where the brakes are. But above and beyond, he was just a phenomenal human. He made me go back into— read old Shakespeare stuff again that I haven't done since I was trying to pretend with my ex-girlfriend when I was in like high school.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:57]:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. But it's a piece out there. There was a, there was a, actually Rhode Island Comic-Con was, was last this weekend. I was, I was surprised there wasn't enough tribute to Patrick Stewart amongst the cosplay, but I, but I digress. Um, but the, but like what you're talking about is kind of like, kind of like what I was talking about where making sure that you Make sure you keep the AI off of the surfaces that shouldn't be on. Because that what you describe, like alert me every time that Andy blogs about something that I might be interested in, is something that AI can definitely do. But do you want AI to handle that job for me? On how many things, like I've been trying to, I've been trying to figure out, find us not a solution, but a helper for this sort of thing for a long time.

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:40]:
And the thing is, the results are never that good. Every time I go back and once again check its work, say, wow, that was a really interesting story that you missed. Oh, wow, why didn't you— why didn't it collate this? Like when I compare the news of the week that I curate myself, basically knowing to go to different sources, but also knowing what I find interesting. And also being able to give an AI, here is a year's worth of stories that I have found personally interested. Here are the sources that I've gone to oftentimes to look for interesting stories. Can you compile me a list of interesting Apple news from the past week? It's not that great. So maybe that is a surface that I should not be trying to apply AI to. Whereas what I— what might be more interesting is saying, here is an example of 5 or 10 stories from the past week that I thought were really interesting.

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:24]:
Can you find me sources and blogs and publications that tend to talk about stuff like this so that I can continue to look for more stories that are like this? So like I said, it's not— it's not just question of, I don't, uh, we shouldn't trust, uh, AI to not delete our files or to not, or to screw things up. Again, we need to make a conscious choice every single time. Is this, what part of this problem am I solving correctly with AI? What problem, what parts of this problem should I solve myself to get the best result?

Doc Rock [00:31:52]:
You just gave me a phenomenal idea, Andy, for something that I think I could do to massage that because, um, Spotify And Apple Music have gotten better at curating, you know, the music that I like, but only finding, finding discovery days, right? I have a set day for discovery days where it shows me stuff that I haven't heard yet or I haven't seen of yet. I'm thinking about a cool— this is where App Intents would come in, and Mac could probably figure this out with a shortcut. Something that lives like a Safari extension or a Chrome extension that when I read an article that just really tickles my fancy, or I see a website that means something, I could actually put a 1 to 10 score with saying something with my face or sliding a little mouse. And it sort of builds a little bit of these are my things right now. I'm ADHD, so my loves change from week to week, right?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:32:41]:
Totally.

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:41]:
Testify.

Doc Rock [00:32:42]:
But when it says, hey, it's been a minute since you've checked out the latest special edition Bucky's cups, you know, it'll be like, hey, the Christmas cups just dropped. Uh, do you wanna send one of your people who lives near— there's no Buc-ee's in Hawaii— send somebody to go get you the new Christmas cup? It would be able to do that. And I think that that is something that you can massage. And this is where Apple and the, the data of what you're doing and how you interact with it would work really well. And it doesn't have to be somebody else's business that can live completely local in a file on your iCloud so that all your devices can smell it. You know what I mean?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:33:21]:
I think it's— I think you're totally right. I think it's all like, I can see how— I think the problem is we're, we are still like years away from that level of like noticing that you bought something in some other app and then, hey, this new thing came out. Like there's a lot of just, um, for, for most comp companies, it's compute. I think what's interesting about Apple's is whether or not it's just your iPhone doing the work. as opposed to private cloud compute. But there's a— it is just like, that requires memory, that requires like proactiveness, researching things. Even what Andy, you're saying about like, what are— there aren't good quality blogs that cover that stuff and they don't know that, or like only a human would really know and that kind of thing. So I think there's— there are levels of— we, we also are, are still asking ever more from the technology, even though it can like theoretically do it.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:34:18]:
We're now like, okay, we got AI. Like, I really want intelligence, not just like artificial automation and things like that. And the— Well, like, even the— your thing about the blogs is like, technically, if you have— I could see a shortcut where you could interact with the AI models that Apple has, a use model action. You can pass in your stories and be like, hey, find me stories from this week. One of the things it can do is search the web now. So like, There are ways that you can at least piecemeal some of that together and get towards that goal in a way that like Siri absolutely couldn't 6 months ago in the slightest. And I guess my question— further along with this, uh, 27.3. I

Leo Laporte [00:35:01]:
guess my question, and I guess this is for you, Andy, is will end users do this or is this really going to be about companies implementing this in their apps and presenting it to you as a complete

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:13]:
I think this illustrates the danger that Apple is in. I think that there's a real danger that the user interface revolution of the '80s, which was, hey, instead of command lines, let's just have mouses and windows and menus. I think that this current revolution is, don't even have a user interface whatsoever. The ideal is, ask the computer or the phone or whatever what you want done, and it will do it for you. And the thing is, I think that's the thing that people are going to respond to the most, both because Hey, I've got a watch. I can just simply ask the watch, tell the watch what to do, and it's been done for me. Yeah. So I think that's, I think that's the ideal.

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:49]:
However, it does illustrate the danger that Apple is in. If it just means that, does your device have a microphone? Yes. Does it have a connection to the internet? Yes. Then it's irrelevant whether you're running macOS or, uh, or, or Windows or Android or iPhoneOS, because it is the— you're not even interacting with applications directly. So There is no place for you to be impressed with the UI of this app for at least, let's say, 70% of what you're doing. I will say, I think that's the, I think that's the ideal that people are, would, would really, really embrace.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:36:18]:
Just to tie back to the home view, there's, they, in 2024, they launched, uh, interactive snippets, which is a feature of App Intents. Snippets has always been a way that's like, when you ask Siri what the weather is, she can show you what the weather is, not just tell you. They've been updating that view technology to also enable like buttons and be able to do multiple things rather than go into your app. So I think something that I've heard, I hear this all the time because of MCP, is it's like, why would you ever do this if you could just go headless on everything? Yeah. And I lived that life with shortcuts and it kind of like, it's great to have it and then you fully lose context eventually. Like, you are doing everything headless isn't actually that great. I think what people want is the ability to do it headless or with the UI or both in a, like, in the way that it fits in whatever environment.

Leo Laporte [00:37:15]:
They just want it to happen.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:16]:
They don't want to do anything. But that, Matt, that's also really interesting because all these papers that Apple Machine Learning has been put together about how they've got new techniques for understanding user interface. And a lot of the things that you're seeing being surfaced in Gemini and in Claude and all these other things are the ability to— we think about building apps so much as insert money, press button, receive app, caution, filling is hot. I think what we're moving towards is that I ask what the weather is, it displays the information, which is something that smart displays have been able to do for like 8 or 9 years. But it also builds a user interface for, oh, he might want to actually adjust the temperature in the room. I will put a slider that I will develop. I will insert a slider for the temperature control because I know how to talk to the app that does that. Or find me a place to— find me a restaurant that 6 people can eat at that's kind of near MIT on Thursday.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:19]:
And instead of just simply, here's Google Maps, here's this, here's here's a, a custom app. It's like, again, I understand the— as the AI says, I understand the intent of this. I'm going to put up basically— I'm going to create a brand new user interface for like basically a, a paper towel type of app where you're designed to use it once, it serves a purpose, and then you throw away and never interact with it ever again. That's another element that, that could be changing things in the next 5 years.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:38:42]:
I think, I think I, I both believe that makes sense for for when you don't have it. But it's like DoorDash already has a UI for ordering, just showing you that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:53]:
But it's not tailored to how you think and what you want right now.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:38:55]:
I think that's fair, but I think there's a level of like, we get to a point where like there are known UI elements that are, like you said, a slider, and that's already represented in, in something like App Intents, and then they can add it. And it is— I think this is why the headless thing I actually think Apple has the best opportunity with developers is you can go create a cool UI for that thing. And people are always going to be, in my mind at least, more creative than just like, oh, every UI now recreates the Apple Maps interface on the fly every time. Really what I see is like the same thing applies in App Intents in that your UI elements from your app can be repurposed repurposed for widgets, can be repurposed for the home view. And it— so it is doing that same thing. It's taking the UI and fitting it into the paradigm that fits in the moment. But it's not like, I just want a purple map or something. Like, I guess they could also— I think they could totally do that.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:39:59]:
And this would be a framework that they can build off of to enable it. But I don't totally believe in the, like, every time it's going to generate a map from scratch, that it's just like, I still think I hear this just a lot. And it's like, to me, because I've lived in the, yeah, App Intents will do all that. It'll surface all your app actions and everything can be headless. That's all a given to me. And then it's like, go further. And it's like, center the UI that the developer made on the home view and on a different device and can be repurposed anywhere. And I agree that it's like, also AI, for ones that don't have a thing, or if you don't have DoorDash, it could do that.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:40:41]:
They can also download— like, I think Apple— I prefer some people stay in the loop and that developers have some role in our life. People are always more creative. I don't know. I don't want to get into like an AI debate of that part, but it's still like— I think that's what's cool about Apple's thing compared to— sorry, Silicon Valley just wants everything to be headless and all apps to go away and we'll just use I don't think that's— they, they— well, it's because they're selling you their product, right? The difference— Apple, I'm like, I've been like, Apple bought this, a lot of this opportunity 10 years ago with Workflow and had integrated into the OS before people were paying attention.

Leo Laporte [00:41:19]:
It's also—

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:19]:
I would like to— I do, I do often think about this as a way to break up monopolies as well though. It's like DoorDash, Ticketmaster, all these organizations kind of own the entire— own the spaces that they operate. And wouldn't it be great if it's just, look, I don't care what app you go through with it, just basically find me the best solution. I think that there is— I don't believe, nor would I want, headless operations to supplant the work of developers, because as we have seen just in the past couple weeks of the amazing apps that are being built to take advantage of the iPhone Duo, they're way, way more creative. Sometimes though, the app, the function is the destination, not the app. The app is not the destination. And for that reason, it's possible to have a device that works exactly 100% the way that I personally would want a device to work that would almost make no sense and have very little relevance to anybody else for certain tasks that I do pretty darn often. And I think that's an opportunity for paper towel type apps and paper towel type functions, uh, to, to really score very well.

Andy Ihnatko [00:42:22]:
If it— if we're not Broken down into if you're either an iPhone user or you're an Android user, you have to pick one. If we turn into 5 years from now or 10 years from now, where platforms are not quite as distinct as they used to be, after 2 weeks of using your iPhone, it looks like nothing that Apple conceived of or nothing like Google conceived of, because it basically does things through agentic and MCP channels that— and builds operating— builds user interfaces for your most common tasks and tasks and predicting your most common tasks in the way that's most relevant to this one user. The most important user is you, one user, not the only one. That's an ideal that I would like us to see.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:43:02]:
I— this is why I'm like, I'm so stoked. I, I've been an Apple fan for a long time, and I was the Shortcuts guy, and I like totally didn't— I like fell out from believing in any of it. And then looking at those APIs, what you're talking about is the donation lifecycle of App Intents on the OS With, and so Siri already does all that. Like, I think this is why the 27.3 and it opening to all apps and, and the model got smarter too, is like, we're, we're almost there. It is about developers at a certain point and just the fact that it's like, it is version 1 and it's Siri. So like, I don't know. What are you expecting? Oh God, I've never felt so much pressure.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:49]:
So much, so much sympathy with, oh, well, you know, it's Siri.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:43:52]:
Listeners couldn't see my face too.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:54]:
That's the wall that this hardworking female has to climb to get rid of the, eh, it's Siri.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:44:00]:
Give her a chance to get there a bit. And like, I know, I know it's also Apple, but I'm like, where, where it came from to now is really, it's incredible. And like the, what matters is that Apple's doing it. The privacy and the security and the on-device thing and the developer support. And even like you— so literally Vidit, who made Duo Man, the Walkman iPhone Duo thing, has an action-centered design framework around App Intents. And so he like starts from the steps and then also layers on like beautiful UI on top. So it's both, and it's— you get the best of both worlds. Yeah.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:44:38]:
And like, you get it, not the AI is the only one that gets it. Like, that's why the Shortcuts thing There's still many problems with shortcuts and like you are suddenly in there doing control flow in a way that's like, we kind of just don't want to do that anymore. But like for somebody like Andy who wants to plug in his RSS feeds and check with it, like you could build a tool that does that for you in a way that you're like, I don't trust it. It's like you built this so like you can make it better. Like it is under your control. And that's, to me, that's been the most empowering part is like, I'm part of this. I can do this as well with my tools and Siri can do it. And then it's on across all Apple devices.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:45:21]:
It's like, this is what we've all been waiting for with technology. And now you can just also like, whether that what they really need to do is like merge Xcode and Siri and Shortcuts all into that one. Into a single thing, 100%. Siri, you can just be like, make me an app, and she can go design the whole thing. I mean, like, you can be involved and it can do the App Intents part. Like, ah, that's going to be so sick. And it's like, it's not impossible. I mean, I don't know, tell them to tune in.

Doc Rock [00:45:49]:
I, I, I think so, Leo, because again, I think that their big play, which everyone is missing, is Apple is doing the thing of sit back and watch and see what goes on and then plug in where you fit in. They're like that one quiet friend who doesn't really say much, but they're always calculating and doing stuff in the background. Because to Andy's point and to Matt's point, one of the things I think about, and I always put this on my sister, right? My sister's like, you know what? Hey, I want to order a French dip combo from Saul Hank's with extra horseradish. And I wanted to be smart enough to go, Hey, you can do that through DoorDash, you could do that through Uber Eats, you could do that through Wander, but Hank has a system now that allows you to just contact the site, the store directly, and he'll save money because he doesn't have to pay those other guys for their inflated fees. So do you want me to put your order in direct and you just have to pick it up versus—

Matthew Cassinelli [00:46:49]:
If he has an app, yeah.

Doc Rock [00:46:50]:
Bring it to you, right? You know what I'm saying? So he has a website, so in a way a website can be an app. Because the old school method was he would have to work super hard to figure out how to set his, his website up. But now somebody can make a little tool that says, hey, if you are a restaurateur and you own a website, I have a little plugin that you can put into your WordPress or your Wix or Shopify, whatever you're using, that if somebody asks their robots, Android or Apple, to order the matchstick fries French dip combo, that it will circumvent DoorDash and get it to you and you'll save a little money. And you know what I mean?

Matthew Cassinelli [00:47:25]:
Like, like, we're in a place with this type of thing. I think where, where that ends up is like every individual web company now needs to do that. And then we loop back around to like DoorDash again. Um, but like very specifically what you were saying about like ordering a thing of food from this place. What I, the problem with Siri the whole time since 2022 and the app shortcuts on top of app intents, which nobody even knew existed. I'll be honest, is you had to like say the exact phrase and you couldn't say— Yes. You'd have to say like, order from DoorDash. And then she's like, what do you want? And then you're like this.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:48:01]:
Very specifically in the documentation for the 27.3, you can fill in the values of entity properties in your Siri request. And so you can say like, order, and then fill in wings in your mind with that food type. from this app. And it can do that now in a single request. So like that level, whether it would need like to use— if Siri could use WebMCP, then they pretty much could do what you said of like, as long as the website has their own set of actions set up and tools, then Siri being able to coordinate that as opposed to— I mean, like opening Siri It's called disambiguation. When she has to pick, do you want DoorDash or this other app? Having it disambiguate everything on the internet is like obviously too much at a certain point. So I think that's where, again, it's like people would start grouping against a provider and then they would probably pick that, which is again, DoorDash. So like, I think that's where— It is true though that we are at a moment where whoever flips over to be ready for agents and ready, especially for iPhone agents, is like you can supplant DoorDash and be— whoever does this right will be present, and whoever doesn't adopt App Intents is like invisible.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:49:23]:
Correct. Apple could like maybe make it like do some of the UI stuff. Um, do you guys know that computer use from ChatGPT was designed by Ari And, and team who was the Workflow CEO. And so they left Apple, I think, I don't remember if it was 2021 or 2022, started a company.

Leo Laporte [00:49:46]:
Avi Tevenian? Um, no,

Matthew Cassinelli [00:49:49]:
no. Oh no, Ari Weinstein.

Leo Laporte [00:49:50]:
Oh, Ari Weinstein. Okay.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:49:51]:
Um, yeah, uh, they made Sky, which was like a kind of a launcher type app, but it had— they were working on the computer use technology. So like what literally happened is the people who would've done that half at Apple don't work there anymore and went to their competitors and did it better for them. So like, it is a— there's a— Apple always— like, Apple's biggest problem is that they haven't paid AI researchers $1 billion in the last few years to— and they all left to go to somewhere where they could make generational wealth in a single moment. So like, I think that's where like— Hard to compete with. It makes sense that Apple couldn't really keep up on the intelligence side. And that they, they thought they were ready in 2024. But like, I was like, I, my experience of using Shortcuts, okay, I have 50 or I have 400 apps. All of them have App Intents.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:50:44]:
They all have 40 tools. Is Siri, do I think right now in 2024 that Siri is going to be able to figure out across all that the correct information and then get it right? I was like, no, there's no way this is going to work. And so like, I don't know, I guess I should have told Craig then. 'Cause they didn't find out until the spring in a lot of ways that it wouldn't. It's also like phones have battery life and things like that, that when you're doing chat, like ChatGPT is using a whole server thing over there. It's not doing it any local. So like there's a lot that it made sense we didn't get here till now. And I think what, like the sentiment followed where Apple was and what we got in September was really kind of what we should have gotten a year, maybe 2 years ago, probably not realistic 2 years.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:51:31]:
But then really what 27.3 is, is what they should have launched this year as their like new progress. And they're still kind of 6 months behind maybe. But, but they're really like, I don't know about catching up because like we're on a curve of acceleration that's like, but it's, Siri is as good as these tools were like And this 27.3 is kind of like what we got with agents last year. So it's almost like a year and 3 months behind in terms of pure intelligence and agents.

Leo Laporte [00:52:05]:
That's a lifetime in AI, unfortunately.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:52:07]:
But that's why it's so good that this didn't take another 9 months. I think that's— it really matters.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:12]:
There was also, there was also just, just to piggyback on something you said a moment ago, Matt, uh, during— I think it was during the Q&A of the earnings call last week that they mentioned, I think, SpectraSearch going way, way up. And they actually called out that actually most of that is increased salaries for increased salaries. They did not mention exactly where the salaries were going to, but one might infer that, yeah, we realize that if we, we need to keep some of these people and that means giving them $1.2 billion over the, over the next 10 years. And I'm sure it's not that much, but basically—

Matthew Cassinelli [00:52:41]:
The guy at Facebook literally got that as the hiring. So like he already has it.

Doc Rock [00:52:45]:
$1.2 billion against Apple's worth is a rounding error. So there is that. It's really funny to say that out loud. The sentiment of it.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:52:54]:
it is— it destroys morale and things like that. So I think that's where, like, they're very—

Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
And it hasn't produced results, I think, in some other companies. So you could—

Doc Rock [00:53:02]:
They catch up. And as you said it right, Matt, it's not really about catching up because of the curve. The only thing they could do is pull a Charles Leclerc and just cut across the grass and cut in front of Lewis. That was pretty—

Leo Laporte [00:53:14]:
Gain a place by going off track. We're gonna take a break. We'll come back in just a moment with Doc Rock Uh, it's good to see you, Sean, from Honolulu.

Doc Rock [00:53:23]:
You know I can pull segues like nobody else.

Leo Laporte [00:53:25]:
Ah, it's impressive. It's very impressive. Have you seen AI do that?

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:28]:
that?

Leo Laporte [00:53:29]:
He's in the library. He is AI personified. His website, ihnatko.com. And great to have Matthew Castanelli filling in today, uh, for Jason. Do we know where Jason is? Is he on?

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:39]:
Yeah, he's, uh, he's actually— if you're in the Cambridge, Boston area, uh, he is hosting a, uh, event celebrating Dan Moran's new book. So he's going to be at Porter Square Books doing a live Q&A and live talk. That's tomorrow night, Wednesday night at 7:30, I believe.

Leo Laporte [00:53:56]:
Dan's been working on that book for a while. Good. That's out.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:58]:
He is a busy, busy little guy. I'm very jealous.

Leo Laporte [00:54:01]:
Nice. And Christina Warren, do we know where she is today? Nobody knows. She's probably doing some GitHub thing. Anyway.

Matthew Cassinelli [00:54:09]:
Folding and unfolding her iPhone.

Leo Laporte [00:54:10]:
Yeah. We're going to talk about that in just a second. Hinges and more. Back we come to the program. We're watching MacBreak Weekly today. You are watching MacBreak Weekly today. Let's talk about the Duo and hinge problems. I, uh, I feel fortunate because my Duo won't be here till December 7th.

Leo Laporte [00:54:29]:
I still have plenty of time to change my mind. Christina liked it though, didn't she? She seems to like hers. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:36]:
Yeah, she's, she's having a good time. The thing is, like, it's a small percentage, a tiny percentage is having this problem, and those who aren't As long as they can get— so long as they get their head around the idea that this is not an iPhone, and this is not a normal iPhone, and this is not a normal small iPad, this is an iPhone Duo, most of the people that I've seen who have it, like, are pretty digging it.

Leo Laporte [00:54:56]:
Apple Insider says the problem is not a problem with the iPhone Duo, but with a component supplier, the hinge component supplier, and apparently some bad hinges. This is from a Chinese leaker Kang, who said—

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:12]:
sorry, go ahead.

Leo Laporte [00:55:12]:
Go ahead.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:13]:
Oh no, I was saying that it's— that I was going to add that this is particularly interesting because the day that this— on the Friday when consumer— when consumers started getting their devices and it looked very clear that there was a problem somewhere with this device, the— a manufacturer who is essentially the hinge supplier posted a news item, an item on their site that said Regarding news about a certain manufacturer with a certain phone that we, we have— our products, our components were perfect and wonderful and manufactured absolutely to spec. I'm not quoting here, but they basically said whatever the engineering drawings they sent us, that's what we made. Oh. Uh, because their stock had immediately like taken a huge dive because, okay, you, you basically served defective hinges. So if this is actually true that it was The, the, the certain part of the hinge design is a little bit proud, and that was causing certain devices in a certain manufacturing run to go bad. That's not good news for them. And it's also curious as to why, if you are an investable company, why did you lie to all of your, all of your people, assuming that's, that's, that's all that is true?

Leo Laporte [00:56:22]:
So apparently you can tell by serial number whether you're gonna have this issue.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:26]:
Yeah, this was, and We should say this was not like the result of an investigation. This is a Weibo commenter, Weibo blogger, or rumor feed that said that basically it's down to a certain specific component that was wrong or defective or installed wrong. But the rumor that they're putting forth is that this is within a certain range of serial numbers so that they have not— I don't think they've disclosed it. But basically, that's the best-case scenario, which anybody who has one who can check their serial number against a certain range is saying, okay, mine is outside of this range. I don't have to worry that the, the, on the first day after AppleCare expires on this, it's going to break. People, people are hoping for the answer that not only is it a handful of stuff, it's not something that your phone will eventually succumb to this. It's that no, somebody did not— somebody who's manning the production line missed their morning coffee. They were not as attentive as they should have been.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:20]:
So all the phones that were manufactured on a certain date are suspicious. So it also implies that if Apple really, really wants to quash this, and again, if this really is the case, then Apple can simply say, post a, uh, post a repair note that says, check your serial numbers basically for the life of the device. If your, if your phone cracks in this way, we will swap it out free of charge for the life of the device, which will instantly make people like you, Leo, who have pre-orders and are like, should I cancel this? And people who, people who are still within the 2-week return window on the ones that they device, should I return this? It will make them feel a lot better about, about the $2,000 or more that they sunk into this thing.

Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
Yeah, I mean, I still have my 17 Pro Max, which is what I took on the trip, and I feel perfectly good with it and got great pictures with it and everything. And now I'm trying to decide what should I do?

Doc Rock [00:58:05]:
And honestly, Leo, the only reason why I did not pick up a Duo was none of the weirdness about Hinge Gate or anything of that nature. 'Cause I still think, like Matt said, or Andy said, sorry, it's not a phone, it's not an iPad, it's not whatever. It's a whole new thing and I'm ready to check out this quote unquote new paradigm is I— my phone camera is the reason why I get a new phone every year.

Leo Laporte [00:58:26]:
Yeah. It's not as good, is it?

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:27]:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Doc Rock [00:58:28]:
Legit, legit, legit as it is. When people say, why do you get a new phone? One, I work in tech and I like to talk about tech. My YouTube channel is about tech, but I get a new phone every year because of the camera updates, even how minuscule they may be. And I think the one thing that people in our industry, especially the sage ones, we have to fight against the mentality of some of our younger contemporaries Who, let's just say, tried to manipulate the algorithm by always saying, oh, well, this 18 is not that big an upgrade over the 17, so I'm not gonna get it. Apple has no intention for everyone to buy a new phone every year. That would be ludicrous. That'd be a terrible business model. They are expecting the 3 to 4-year-old phone owner to move up to the next phone because that's about the time your battery starts getting goofy.

Doc Rock [00:59:16]:
If you are a light phone user, You will pay for battery replacement, continue to mark, you'll squeeze 5 years out of it. If you are a medium phone user, you will probably switch to whatever the flagship or the newer model is. I shouldn't say flagship, whatever the current model is. If you're like us and you are a bleeding edge, slide down the razor blade into a pool of alcohol person, you will spend $2,000 every year on a new phone.

Leo Laporte [00:59:41]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doc Rock [00:59:42]:
And you don't care because it's a business expense. We're writing it off. I really hate the way Threads is the— is if you want to entertain yourself with just dumb comments, go to Threads. But people go nuts over this concept. And if you look at the scale— this dude bought a case already for the Duo. When you look at the scale—

Leo Laporte [01:00:01]:
Don't look, don't look. That's my pick of the week. Don't look.

Doc Rock [01:00:04]:
When you look at— all I have is the case of what's being sold. I

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:07]:
don't have a phone. That's all I can afford myself.

Doc Rock [01:00:09]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:00:09]:
I can afford the case.

Doc Rock [01:00:11]:
Right. When you peep the scale of what's being sold, you realize that, yeah, Apple is not like wanting everybody to change every time. So that stuff just drives me crazy and I wish people would trying to like, like sort of push back against that and just like be more real about it. And I guess it's sad because I got flamed on Threads because I was like, you know, my buddy Marques is in a position of height where he should be a little bit cleaner about things like, oh, the Home View for $299 is expensive. And I'm like, Not for what it is, bro. Like, not right now. Right. And, and if it doesn't match your value proposition, say that it doesn't match my value proposition.

Doc Rock [01:00:56]:
Yeah. I look at stuff that's $5 and I won't spend $5 on it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:59]:
Some $5 stuff is expensive for what you get.

Doc Rock [01:01:01]:
Yeah. For what you get. And so when we, when we phrase it as, you know, properly as the value proposition or whatever, which most of us, you know, old school journalistic type people, we do that. But I feel like the young ones flaming stuff is just too fun or it's too clicky and that behavior will continue. But in a way you're misguiding the people who look at you as a beacon of which direction should I go. And they might mis— mis— mis-skew what you say about the affordability of something because you chose to use the lazy word as opposed to leaving it a little bit more expression. It's a good point.

Leo Laporte [01:01:37]:
It's not expensive. It's just what it is. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I, I'm trying to decide though. I mean, I guess I could keep my 17 Pro Max. which by the way, I found out has a better camera, the Pro Max, than the Duo even.

Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
I thought maybe the Duo would be a step back. Oh, I didn't know that. No, no, it's the iPhone 18 Pro or a 17 Pro rather that it's comparable to. The base model, not even the Pro, the 17, 48-megapixel Fusion. And I was thinking maybe I just keep this, which is getting great images for me, would continue to get better images than the Duo, the 17 Pro Max, and then Buy the new iPad, the OLED iPad, which everybody seems to be raving about, and just live with that instead.

Doc Rock [01:02:16]:
Have you played with the Leica app on any of the iPhones since '16 forward?

Leo Laporte [01:02:21]:
Yeah, the Photos app. Yeah, I use that.

Doc Rock [01:02:23]:
Yeah. The Leica app, the one for taking the pictures, I think it's called Leica Lux. I hate myself for paying $6 a month for it, but I just don't care because it is hands down the best photo app in the game. It takes beautiful pictures and it has that like look to it.

Leo Laporte [01:02:41]:
But I don't need to because I'm gonna get a Duo, so it's a waste of money.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:44]:
But also, like, just again, I'm enjoying this side quest on cameras, but the thing is like now that you have apps like Snapseed, a free app that can import like LUTs from Photoshop, I'm wondering if even apps like— I think that the delta on how— on a quality of a camera is now gonna have to be pretty pretty good, pretty, pretty wide for it not— you not be able to simply say, well, I don't— I prefer the pictures off of this camera than this camera, but even the cheaper older camera with this custom LUT that I have, or this LUT that I've bought from someplace, that gives me that Leica look. It's like, it gives me the Leica look I want, even though it's not embedded into the image pipeline. I just want the— this, uh, this PNG file to look really, really good.

Doc Rock [01:03:27]:
And Andy, to your point, something that you can do, because I— you were just saying how AI can fall on when it breaks at times, you can go get a series of photos that you really like that have a certain je ne sais quoi. And you can say, hey, build me a custom LUT based off of this reference that I can apply with Snapseed that will give me as close as possible to this look with the photos I take in my New England light. And you know, New England, second week in November is one of the most beautiful places in the country. So pretty.

Leo Laporte [01:03:56]:
Yeah.

Doc Rock [01:03:56]:
Like, absolutely. Right. But to be able to lift that, that orange, right? Or when I'm in Amesbury in October and there is a pumpkin every 75 feet, it is what— against the bricks. It is like I tell my friends all the time when I go to the office in like fall, it's like driving around in a live Norman Rockwell painting. Okay. Old people know what that is. Matt is going, what are you talking about?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:04:19]:
Oh no, I know. I'm in Oregon too. So it's got the same— not, not the same, but what about—

Doc Rock [01:04:24]:
Oregon's pretty.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:04:25]:
I feel like Leo, they invented iPhones. phone handoff for you that you can use both phones. Yeah, but I want to trade in—

Leo Laporte [01:04:31]:
I'm not gonna— oh my God, I mean, uh, that's $1,000 I'm getting back from Apple for trading in the 17 Pro Max.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:38]:
And it's— and it's—

Leo Laporte [01:04:39]:
look at this picture. I took this with the 17 Pro Max, and I just feel like this is, this is as good as a camera needs to be. I brought a Leica with me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:04:47]:
And, uh, I brought a nice Ricoh black and white, but this is the 17. And I—

Doc Rock [01:04:51]:
Um, which, which Leica do you I've not decided to rail this. It's just a quick answer.

Leo Laporte [01:04:55]:
Uh, M11P with, uh—

Doc Rock [01:04:56]:
Oh my God, you're okay. I hate you.

Leo Laporte [01:04:59]:
Yeah, I'm very— I have excellent stuff.

Doc Rock [01:05:03]:
Next time you do something bad, I'm gonna tell Lisa.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:06]:
It's, it's annoying. It's annoying that like there is absolutely a difference between even a smaller sensor, like quote real unquote camera, and, and a phone. However, scrolling through Apple Photos, Scrolling through Google Photos. It's what's in your pocket. It's what you've got. You're not gonna see the difference immediately if it did a good job, or if you spent all of 12 seconds pushing sliders to make it look exactly the way that you wanted it to. But, but getting back to the Duo, one of the things that is keen— what I'm pleased to hear from so many of the, of the people who own one, and I've had exactly at this point only about 3 hours worth of hands-on time with it, so I'm going from what I've heard.

Leo Laporte [01:05:44]:
Oh, you're ahead of me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:46]:
Well, what I'm pleased to hear is that all the things that annoy them about it— and there are a lot of things that annoy them about it— they're all software things, things that Apple can fix and tweak as they go along. Like, they don't like how— Yeah, exactly. So the problem would be if, again, if all screen— if the problem would be if like the battery kind of absolutely stunk. The problem would be if the trans— if, uh, things that they can't fix with another software update were the things that were annoying people the most, with the, with the exception of the people who were annoyed that, again, their screens broke within the first hour. Again, they, they're righteously annoyed by that. That's not a feature that they promoted. And I will be.

Leo Laporte [01:06:23]:
But is Apple presumably not shipping those? I mean, uh, or is there a chance I might get one of those?

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:29]:
I don't think they're not admitting it. Well, what they, they've been— their reaction to it has been evolving. On day one, people at the Genius Bar were kind of snippy with when they're presented with one of these things, the broken screen. They said, how did you drop it? Did you just slip it out of your hands? And not simply believing them.

Leo Laporte [01:06:48]:
That's their default.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:49]:
Yeah, but now Apple apparently has sent basically a note to the Genius Bar saying this is a known issue. Don't be snide. Exactly. If you see it breaking this way, assume that— I don't know what the direction is, but they're basically saying be aware that this is a recurring issue. And don't simply assume that it was user error that the person's gonna have to pay for. I would, I would hope for that again if it does come out to be this best-case scenario where they can track it down, that everything is perfect, all phones are fear-free of design and manufacturing defects except for the ones within this serial number range. And if you've— it's within the serial number, serial number range, basically you've got essentially infinite AppleCare for that display if it— if it—

Leo Laporte [01:07:29]:
I did buy the AppleCare Plus.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:07:31]:
I do assume they'd have to replace Replace it. Like, yeah, the availability, like, do you have to wait months to get there? Yeah, I was just trying to make that shortcut, by the way, to open the about page of your device, take a screenshot, get the serial number out, and look up if it's in that range. Um, I don't think— I think Apple can identify. I don't think they're like, Apple hasn't figured it out here. It's just, it's, it's— they just mean it's like serial numbers enable them to go back to the specific manufacturer. Yeah, they're like, oh, it's all from this company, they're the ones that are the issue. Not— it's not like John Ternus's hinge design.

Doc Rock [01:08:07]:
Okay, can I tell you something really funny? Even with the Zoom compression, I'm looking at Leo's photos from his M11P and then the ones from the iPhone.

Leo Laporte [01:08:16]:
Can you tell the difference?

Doc Rock [01:08:18]:
Oh, I can tell because I, I'm a Leica person. Like, I know that what I'm looking for—

Leo Laporte [01:08:21]:
There's a certain look. Yeah,

Doc Rock [01:08:22]:
but I mean, you're even— again, to, to my point, You will even be able to say, hey, I want to set the Apple, you know, oh my God, my brain's going to be done. The creative style.

Leo Laporte [01:08:32]:
Right.

Doc Rock [01:08:33]:
I want to set the Apple creative style to the best I possibly can to get it close to my Summilux, you know, whatever, 35.

Leo Laporte [01:08:41]:
Yeah. That's what I was shooting with. Yep.

Doc Rock [01:08:43]:
I can see I'm cheating. I want you guys to think I'm that gangster. Okay. Listen, I'm cheating.

Leo Laporte [01:08:49]:
I'm gangster.

Doc Rock [01:08:50]:
But like, it would be able to tell you what to go in and slide around. Now, when we get to the point where App Intensity stuff is working properly, It would be able to actually, you know, you have your phone plugged in and go into your phone and actually set it up for you. But either way, we are in a position now where you can get so close. And I think this is exciting. It also helps those people who, you know, get this idea that I need to buy something new because somebody said so. And well, you just, you just kind of don't. Like now you can, you can do some things, you can get creative. And, uh, maybe if they keep increasing the, the camera to the nice way, we can get Andy back.

Leo Laporte [01:09:27]:
What, what do you think of Chromagraph? Did you see Ryan's Johnson's app.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:09:30]:
That's sick.

Leo Laporte [01:09:32]:
You like it? I installed it. I thought— but then in fact, I even made it the camera button for a while, but I thought, nah, I don't know, I'm just gonna— I could do that after in post. I could do it in post. I don't need to do it. Will you photograph?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:09:43]:
That's probably—

Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
no, probably not, but I could if I wanted to.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:09:46]:
I think it's just like, it's one of those things of like, it has an opinion on what camera it does look like, and it's like, it makes everything look like Knives Out. Yeah, like, yeah, I think it's a good example too of that with like being able to have an app intent to apply it to your existing photos is something that they could do and you could kind of get best of both worlds. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:06]:
Yeah.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:10:06]:
No, it's definitely—

Leo Laporte [01:10:07]:
So I shouldn't worry about my Duo camera. I should just live with it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:12]:
My, my, my take is that, well, overall, like if you have one in preorder, keep the preorder. You can, and mostly, and mostly just spend the 2 weeks actually Yeah, spend the next— spend the 2 weeks you have in the return policy. Not just— if it doesn't break on the first couple of days, it looks like it's not gonna break. Is that the case?

Leo Laporte [01:10:29]:
It'll break right away?

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:30]:
That seems to be the experience. Should I go— or at least according to— I've not seen people on social media or on Reddit saying, I've had it for a month now and it finally broke. It's basically either breaks right away, either breaks the first couple days.

Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
Okay, well, that's good.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:44]:
But basically, but basically be looking out for the fact that is this version 2 version 1.0 for you, because it is annoying. Uh, uh, uh, Gruber had like the quote of the, of the week by basically saying that when unfolded, it's the best iPhone in the world. When it's folded, it's the worst iPhone in the world. Right. Mostly, mostly because of he just doesn't like how squat and how small the screen is. Right. Uh, but that— so if you, if after 2, if after 2 weeks you're still feeling it, keep it. If you're not feeling it, get rid of it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:10]:
Uh, but hopefully if you have not— if the safest thing to do would be to return it and wait for Apple to say, okay, we've got a revision A Or basically, we know that this has happened exactly within this. You have a— you— we can prove to you that you have a good one, you don't have a bad one. If you're— if you're fearful about that, return it. You might have to wait a few months to get— to get a replacement. But yeah, I mean, those— Apple's making plenty. A few months?

Leo Laporte [01:11:36]:
So I should not send my 17 back yet? A few months?

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:41]:
Well, I mean,

Doc Rock [01:11:42]:
you have 2 weeks after you get it before you have the Put— yeah, when you get the box from Apple and you get the new phone, you have 14 days. You got 14 days, and so you can send it in. So at that time frame, just beat the brakes off the Duo to make sure you absolutely love it, and then if not, you can, you can do that. Also, you can—

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:03]:
also, another thing from the earnings call last week, I think Ternus actually said that they don't think they're gonna have any more to ship before the holidays. So, wow. So like I said, but again, they'll make more of them. If you're not, if you're not feeling it after a week and a half, don't feel— don't take the risk that 6 months from now you'll fall in love with it because you've— you're already so invested in it. Like I said, you can return it and then by January or February you can get another one. And, and then if, if you, if you feel as though things have changed or the software has improved or you've proven to yourself that no, there's no, there's no problem with the hardware, I'm not— it's not going to break on me. That said, please, please, please do keep in mind that, like I said earlier, it's not an iPhone and it's not an iPad. And part of that means that, like, whereas, like, I dropped my new phone, like, over the summer, like, on week number 1, and I picked it up off the ground and I did not expect in any way, shape, or form to suffer any damage whatsoever because that's how well these things have been built, because they've been built this way for 10 or 20 years.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:02]:
Yeah. If you drop your iPhone Duo or any foldable phone, do not expect that it's going to still work. If you use it as an e-reader, if you, if you use it at the beach, despite whatever ingress protection it has, if it's a windy day, don't necessarily expect that there's going to be no damage. Nothing's gonna—

Matthew Cassinelli [01:13:19]:
That's the one that it does seem the sketchiest of all of them.

Leo Laporte [01:13:21]:
Keep the sand out of it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:22]:
There's one, oh, there's one, I think it's for under the sand.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:13:25]:
Well, the guy's O-rings, it's like, yeah, if your kid buries your Duo in the sand, you might be done for.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:31]:
That's device torture porn. But the thing is—

Doc Rock [01:13:34]:
Device torture porn stuff kills me. Thank you for the name, Andy. I've always tried to think of like what they call it. I call it words that I can't say on this show because I appreciate Leo. But yeah,

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:46]:
it's like, gee, you know what? I think I will clock into this 'cause I'm curious to see if this new phone will survive a direct hit from a .50 caliber bullet. I'm very curious. Thank you

Doc Rock [01:13:54]:
for putting me on time. Let's just call it elitist chuckery. That works.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:59]:
Yeah, it's nice to have $2,000 to basically throw away on something.

Doc Rock [01:14:02]:
Well, the algorithm's gonna give 'em back like 10x that. That's the reason why.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:06]:
Yeah, I know, I know. But it's still, it's like, it's like throwing like a full platter of food away because—

Leo Laporte [01:14:12]:
I always hated Will It Blend because I just hated what they were doing to those nice devices.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:14:18]:
I've seen some people that, I think what's hard for iPhone users is we're not used to foldables. And there are, like I saw some people talking about like when it's closed, it kind of does eventually get a little give and that that becomes annoying typing on the outside and stuff. And like, Like, that's just what all foldables do. And so I think that's what is interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:14:37]:
Well, I've had multiple foldables. I've had Samsung Folds and Flips, so I have some experience with them. I like the, I like the size of the Duo. We'll see. I mean, I feel like it was my job to try it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:52]:
Yeah, well, no, again, and just, just, just be— everyone who's considering buying one, just remember that even if they do this perfectly, perfectly, the hinge is always going to be a weak spot. It's always an opportunity for ingress. And when I talk about using things on the beach, like, that, that video is terrible. But the thing is, on a windy day, there are grains of sand that are being scattered around in the air. You do not know that something got in. In Hawaii?

Doc Rock [01:15:13]:
Yes, absolutely.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:14]:
Exactly. So like, again, and it's terrible because it is like the perfect device for like reading, but I don't even use like my regular phone like at the beach if I can, if I can avoid it. Because again, Is

Leo Laporte [01:15:24]:
there a case that will protect it?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:15:29]:
Probably the hinge, I think, is just like ultimately— There's no way around it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:32]:
It's just fundamentally—

Matthew Cassinelli [01:15:33]:
They should just get a bumper and then you should just hold it correctly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:37]:
Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:38]:
At least we haven't seen that you're folding it wrong. At least we haven't seen that yet.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:15:43]:
That is a good— that should have been the part.

Leo Laporte [01:15:45]:
You're folding it wrong. Let's take a little break. We'll have more with— you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Jason and Christina are out, but we're thrilled we got Matthew Cassinelli. Filling in, and Dr. Rock, that's Sean Boyd here, and of course Andy Ihnatko. Uh, we— do we love— has anybody got the, uh, iPhone, um, I mean the iPad, uh, Mini, the OLED? I see me seeing great reviews. I was very tempted.

Doc Rock [01:16:09]:
I'm looking at it because I'm traveling with the freaking M4, M4 fully loaded.

Leo Laporte [01:16:15]:
It's too big. Yeah, that's what I brought on my trip.

Doc Rock [01:16:17]:
Dude, it's heavier than my MacBook or close to the same. Like, so yeah, I've been really looking at this because I just realized something super stupid. I built a mileage tracker, uh, to keep up with what I'm doing. Yo, I have 119,000 miles in the air this year.

Leo Laporte [01:16:32]:
Holy cow.

Doc Rock [01:16:34]:
I'm like, this—

Leo Laporte [01:16:35]:
that's a lot of flying.

Doc Rock [01:16:36]:
Oh, when you live in the ocean,

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:38]:
you must have an amazing number of diseases by now. I'm impressed.

Doc Rock [01:16:40]:
Oh no, I, I don't, I don't get sick, bro. I got— see, I got techniques. I'll explain it to you.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:16:44]:
With the iPad Mini, you could fly the

Doc Rock [01:16:47]:
Yeah, I just think, I think it would be just so good just because like now I'm tired of carrying a heavy thing around and people just throw that seat back, back and it always hits my iPad. You know, I'm like, you know, you can lean back slowly, right? They just go and I'm just like, bro, what are you doing? You're killing me. Stuff's spilling back here. So yeah, I kind of think it, the Mini is back. I just felt like that. It was a proud moment for the OG Mini hatters, hatters, havers. Havers. Like, I feel like it's been neglected for so long, but this time I feel like the Mini is back.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:17:19]:
I'm glad they waited till after the Duo at least though for it. Yeah, because it is like, I would want— it's like I would get a Mini if I wasn't gonna get the Duo. And it's kind of interesting that they're almost cannibalizing, but that's still— I don't know, probably not really. It's still a separate

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:35]:
category. And I'm 100% with you, Doc. It's like, I, I don't think my next iPad is going to be a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. I really do want something that is iPad-ish, powerful enough and a bigger screen, but small enough that I don't necessarily have to carry a laptop bag with me everywhere I go. The only bummer that I thought about it— I am considering buying one, but the only bummer is that now it's definitely close to iPad Pro price, whereas this used to be— Yeah, a lot more affordable. cheap and affordable. And like, no, it's not the biggest processor. No, it doesn't have the best camera.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:09]:
No, it doesn't have the, the premier prestige build quality.

Leo Laporte [01:18:12]:
You're paying for the screen, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:13]:
But it's a, but it's a $400, $500 device. And wow, it's really good for $400 or $500. And now it's like, that's a lot of money to spend on a little pad. Why am I— why would I not get like a regular-sized iPad if that is my, if that is my goal? Not to have the best of the best, but simply to have like a device that is smaller than my 12.9-inch whatever, like, okay, now it's pricey enough that I might even just want to go for like a regular iPad Air instead of, uh, and have a little bit more screen and a little bit more productivity, uh, capability than this one.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:18:43]:
I, I went in doing the same thing. Isn't it like $699 base?

Doc Rock [01:18:47]:
$699. Yeah.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:18:48]:
And it was now, um, mine was like $1,100, the one that I want. And I was like, all right, yeah, that's not a, that's no longer a, like, I can justify it as like a treat yourself something. That's like, no, you messed with your, your budget now. Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
Yeah, that is a lot.

Doc Rock [01:19:04]:
So of the iPad lineup, what's the cheapest OLED? Is it the $699? Uh, because the Air is not OLED, is it?

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:13]:
Air is not OLED. Uh, but the thing is, like, I think for my use case, the thing I'm talking about is that I don't necessarily need— I would rather have a couple hundred bucks back, either make it cheaper or spend that more money on more storage. So like something like the normal iPad, which is 4 or $149. If I had a budget of $700 to spend on iPad-y things, it would probably be base iPad but with lots of storage rather than—

Doc Rock [01:19:38]:
Yeah, true story.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:39]:
You know, it's fine because like, like, like you said, Matt, like a lot— it is like the darling of aviation. And a lot of people who are— if you can afford, if you can afford an airplane, you know what, I don't think $700 is gonna break you.

Doc Rock [01:19:53]:
Well, see, here's what I get you.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:19:55]:
Second iPad iPad, or like your second. If you are— if you can get above the iPad Air and you need a smaller thing, you're probably traveling. Yeah, like they have the right mix for the right people. It is just like they

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:07]:
know their customers.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:20:08]:
It's not for kids anymore.

Doc Rock [01:20:10]:
You're so correct because of this, this one exact fact, right? If you're going to go off of the iPad with a little bump in storage, that puts you at $549, which is only $150 off of getting the iPad Mini. But if you compare them on 256 to 256, then the gap is still $549 versus $799, which is a $250 gap. That's a little harder to push, right? So if it's, if it's about the screen, you'd go with the Mini. If it's about the storage, you probably would just get the Air and move on from there. And, you know, honestly, I, I don't think I would use the power stuff. It'd be more for just plain traveling. Yeah. And then I guess the other part is, Andy, how are you at— I know, 'cause you are still a writer.

Doc Rock [01:21:01]:
How is your typing going to be on the Mini? And, you know, that keyboard is always gonna be $300 unless you go Logitech. So.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:10]:
I would, I've, uh, you know what, I've, I'm preparing a piece, probably we'll publish next week about folding and, and smaller, like portable keyboards. And so there's a fold— there are a couple of foldable keyboards that don't exceed the footprint of the iPad or the iPad Mini that I'd be taking with me. That I've actually written a whole bunch of pieces on exactly that setup, an iPad Mini-sized tablet plus a folding keyboard that essentially— now that it's, as I keep saying, it's— this writing setup is pocket-sized given that it is fall and now I have like jackets with real pockets on them. But the thing is, it's, yeah, I would I can't— I couldn't imagine spending $300 for a Magic Keyboard case. That just really just— now, given that for me the iPad is not going to be a primary device, it's not like I'm buying my kid like, here's your computer, your computer you can call your own, put whatever stickers you want on it because it's yours. As a secondary or even a tertiary device, there is definitely an upper limit to how much I can justify spending on this. And so— $100. That's why that $100 Even if it's just $150, it's like I'm already kind of stretching the credibility of this by spending $500 on this device that I just want to occasionally read comics on and occasionally take with me when I've just got like a meeting in town and just want to amuse myself or be a little bit productive on commuter rail.

Doc Rock [01:22:28]:
And, and you know, one thing that, one thing that I've been able to do recently, which is surprising to me cuz I chanced it on my last trip, I had a rather lengthy, uh, voyage. I decided to leave the Magic Keyboard home and I only had the folio case because all of the writing and stuff I needed to do for work, sending emails or whatever, like, well, WhisperFlow is pretty solid. So I did the majority of the writing just by talking and then just fixing it with the onscreen keyboard. But I'd be totally interested in your piece because yeah, now I don't need to carry something that big. And I am looking to shrink this down, uh, compliments of old age. And I do have a lot of traveling coming up again next year.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:23:09]:
Yeah. You didn't use Apple, Apple Intelligence writing tools to clean it up?

Doc Rock [01:23:13]:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Apple Intelligence writing tools?

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:15]:
That's weird. I've got, I've got blue tape over anything that involves creation when it comes to AI. But, but Doc, like I'm gonna, this is where there's another thing that I haven't, I haven't published yet, but I haven't really figured out what I wanna say. But it's like I have the, but the Android phone that I upgraded to this summer is the first Android phone I've owned that will support an external display. Okay, and based on that, this little— this display will work via USB 3, like DisplayPort over USB. It cost me $60. Yep. And when I plug this into this phone, I get a full desktop experience.

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:51]:
And once again, with adding, adding a little Logitech mouse and a phone keyboard, I've got like a really good productivity setup for that commuter rail sort of thing. I'm not saying it's— it's not saying it's as good as, as a real laptop. I'm saying that if I just want some productivity or a bigger screen to watch stuff on while I'm on that commuter rail voyage or on the— on my tray table, it's, it's an $80 total investment that will probably suffice. And it's got me thinking, God, the iPad Mini will support an external display. Why doesn't the iPhone support an external display? Because that That would be killer. The Apple Android desktop mode is, it's not really great. It suffices, it's decent, but it wasn't designed from the ground up to be an external desktop sort of setup. It's basically, hey, what can we do within the limitations of current Android that will give people multiple windows and an application dock and stuff like that? If Apple were to present like the kind of experience you get when you hook up an external display to an iPad to the iPhone, That would be a superior experience that I think would make a lot of people think twice about whether or not they actually need an iPad, which is probably a factor in why they don't actually do it.

Leo Laporte [01:25:03]:
It does make you wonder what Apple's thinking when it's making a product that's this expensive. And I guess they don't have much choice because of Ramageddon, but I wonder how well this is gonna sell. It does seem like a kind of

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:14]:
an

Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
out-of-reach product.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:16]:
Like I said, I'm sure they know their market, and they wouldn't— if they If they found out that they're not selling that many iPad Minis because it's too expensive, they would have tried to build a version of it that kept it low. They know that they could— they, they— their market will enjoy having an OLED display. They will enjoy having something of a premium feel and premium process, premium productivity, premium resources on the device. They're not looking for something that's inexpensive as sort of an adjunct device. I will give you a regret it.

Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
An example, because 25 years ago today, the iPod went on sale, November 10th, 2001. In 2001 dollars, it was $399. That's $760 in today's money. So that's more expensive than an iPad Mini, and people bought it, lots of them, right? It was 1,000 songs in your pocket. Um, so prices depend on really, uh, a lot of things, and, uh, People were willing to spend that kind of money for the first iPod.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:16]:
Well, also remember that it was— there was nothing like it. You were not limited. You're not limited to like, oh well, whatever 2 CDs worth of music will fit, kind of fit on this, on a device that cost almost as much as that. Like, no, no, here's a— literally the slogan was 1,000 songs in your pocket, which was just— you mean that I can actually like be out of— I If I wanted to run away from work and my family for— it would be 3 weeks before I'd have to come back just to load this thing up with more music. All right, sign me up.

Leo Laporte [01:26:46]:
Happy 25th birthday to the iPod, a category that no longer exists. There are no more iPods, right? That's it, it's

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:54]:
over. But there's a resurgence. Like, I don't know if it's a resurgence in the same sense that—

Leo Laporte [01:26:57]:
Well, you could buy a Walkman today too. Sony's reviving the Walkman. There's a nostalgia factor, I guess.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:03]:
Well, not just nostalgia. There— if you do a search for like personal music players or digital music players, there, there are a lot of companies that are making very, very good— like FiiO is making a lot of really good under $100 devices.

Leo Laporte [01:27:15]:
FiiO makes great stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:15]:
Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, again, you— that's a good point. I don't know whether it's just like CD and cassette revival, people are being nostalgic, or whether this really is a revolution for— look, I don't— Spotify and Apple Music and these subscription music services are not doing it for me. I want something smaller, cheaper, that I have more control over. But boy, would I love it if Apple were to find a way to market another version of the iPod. Because although you can, you can store music right on your watch, on an Apple Watch, and it's more convenient and does Bluetooth, they'll do everything, that's great. But there really is something about having this device in your hand that is not connected to anything, doesn't require— it's not listening to music It's not conditional upon a lot of things working correctly. It's like, nope, it's your— there are files on this device and a piece of software that plays those files through whatever device is connected to it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:03]:
You're good.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:28:04]:
What if the AirPods case became—

Doc Rock [01:28:07]:
Oh my God, that was so perfect.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:28:08]:
Got a screen.

Doc Rock [01:28:09]:
And the resurgence of people—

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:11]:
I will back your Kickstarter as a founding backer, sir.

Leo Laporte [01:28:14]:
That's actually a great idea.

Doc Rock [01:28:15]:
The resurgence of people building these things on YouTube is amazing. And the companies that are selling the kits that can convert to these—

Leo Laporte [01:28:23]:
That's nostalgia though, right? That's nostalgia.

Doc Rock [01:28:25]:
And part of it is nostalgia, but The last one I saw was a guy who's a DJ, and again, he hearkened back to the days of just knowing that you had all your stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:28:33]:
Yeah, if you're a DJ, you brought your iPod and you had everything.

Doc Rock [01:28:36]:
Yeah, you had everything in that one little spot. What, like, I used to carry mine in the booth when somebody would ask me for something that's super really crazy avant-garde and not in my standard kit, but they can't remember the names. I could show them a couple things to help them try to find the name of the song while I'm changing songs. Like, here's the iPod, here's the over-the-ears, figure out Which are— oh, you know that one song that goes— I was like, bro, come on. Like, not, not, not pre-whispering.

Leo Laporte [01:28:58]:
What do I look like, Shazam? What do I look like?

Doc Rock [01:29:00]:
But, you know, go and figure it out. Now, the other thing that I thought was, uh, pretty interesting, Andy, I just— I, I know I've done it before, so I was making sure it wasn't one of my drunken stupors. Uh, the iPhone 18 Pro Max does support, uh, USB to DisplayPort because I just connected it to my—

Leo Laporte [01:29:16]:
Oh, that's cool.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:16]:
But it just mirrors though. It doesn't give you like a desktop.

Doc Rock [01:29:19]:
Oh, I see what you're saying, to bring out the whole do thing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:23]:
Ah, like, and Samsung has something called DeX, which is even more ambitious. Literally, it's like running like a Linux distro, like on the desktop.

Doc Rock [01:29:30]:
100%.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:31]:
But, but just, just to, just to give you an example, I do have— I, I've bifurcated my music listening in which, uh, I listen to Spotify for most of my discovery, and if I'm honest, most of my music listening. But at some point, if a certain certain album has become so popular that I want to— I will give it a forever home by buying the CD, probably used, or buying it digitally on wherever, and then adding it to my media server in my media library. And I do have a digital Walkman that has like a half a terabyte card in it that has literally all of the music that I've ever owned that I like enough to keep. Because I don't— I don't— it's not— it's partly because I want to own the music that I have, but also I want to own the playlists I have. I don't want to at some point keep— realize that the reason why I'm continuing to subscribe to Spotify is because I've got so many playlists on there that I could not— replicating it on Apple Music would be too much trouble. So I'll continue to pay for Spotify because of that. The, the central truth of my playlist is always going to be on that device and on my Plex server and stuff like that.

Doc Rock [01:30:33]:
When, when I canceled Spotify, 2 things I did. I ran through Songbird first, and it did okay, but it failed at some things. And then And I had, this is early too. This is like ChatGPT February when it's all of November, December, January, February, 4 months old ChatGPT. I said, hey, here's what Songbird was able to find. Can you go find out what's missing from the Apple Music? And the things that were missing from the catalog, I said, can you find it on YouTube Music? Because YouTube Premium. And it was like, absolutely, here's what you have. So I was able to build most of my playlists again, just having the the old school bod do it.

Doc Rock [01:31:09]:
Now I'm sure it's way better. I haven't done this in a while. It'd be worth looking into. Yeah. Um, but one of the things that I also found out that was quite interesting about this setup is there's a guy and his daughter, uh, that do these Instagram Reels. I think it's a whole podcast. It's called Daddy Daughter Issues. And he handed his 20-year-old daughter— I think she's 22— uh, a CD and said, uh, play Bust a Move from this, um, Young MC, uh, thing.

Doc Rock [01:31:38]:
And so the case is closed. She's flipping it over. She cannot figure out how to get it open. And then when she finally gets it open, she's like, oh, there's a thing inside. What am I supposed to do with this? And he's like, he's not giving her any hints. They have an old, you know, the one-piece Sony that had everything, you know, with the speakers on the side. So he's trying to— It's a slot. Go in there and play Bust a Move.

Doc Rock [01:31:59]:
Anyway, the questions and the pure innocence of the things she's asking, trying to find this. And she was like, well, how do you know which one song it is? Like, and how come there's only 14 songs in here? Like,

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:12]:
now you, now you know my pain, daughter. You know the pain that I go through.

Doc Rock [01:32:15]:
Oh my God, it was, it's so glorious.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:17]:
And it's not even— and I gave you one that didn't even have that cellophane on it that was impossible to remove.

Doc Rock [01:32:22]:
100%. Like, the cellophane, oh dude, I had special cutters for the cellophane. But the funny thing is, I had an uncle and niece, uh, maybe like about 6 months ago, And my niece says to me, Uncle, uh, can you take me to the vinyl store? And I was like, what?

Leo Laporte [01:32:38]:
Vinyl?

Doc Rock [01:32:38]:
She's like, vinyl. You know, I'm like, Emma, what are you talking about? She says, you know, you're a DJ, you know what vinyl is. And I'm like, what? Like, I didn't even register because I'm driving or whatever. And then she goes, well, I just need to go to the record store. I was like, okay. So we go to the record store and she goes, see, she pulls out an album and she goes, this is vinyl. Vinyl, kid. Vinyl.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:00]:
Oh,

Doc Rock [01:33:00]:
and And she was like, what? And I was like, oh my God. To think that she is a 4.5 straight-A student hurt my absolute brain.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:08]:
Yeah, dude, don't, don't, don't go to Reddit and don't go to the What Is This Thing subreddit and watch people show a device that has a USB, a mini USB port on it and ask, what kind of connector is this? I'm like, you're trolling me. You're trolling me. You're not pretending that you don't know what a mini USB is. I'm glad if true, I'm glad you don't. You don't know what a mini USB is, because that was another source of our pain in the 2000s.

Leo Laporte [01:33:31]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Iannacca, who does know what micro USB is and is proud of it. Sean Boyd, Doc Rock, who used to play vinyl when he was a DJ.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:43]:
Spin those licorice discs, man.

Leo Laporte [01:33:46]:
I remember I got a— when I was a DJ in college, they sent us a copy of Strawberry Letter Number 23 that smelled like strawberries. It was, it was red and looked like strawberries.

Doc Rock [01:33:56]:
The original or the Brothers Johnson version?

Leo Laporte [01:33:59]:
The original.

Doc Rock [01:34:00]:
Oh my God. That's one of my favorite songs in the world, Leo. I don't know how we always manage to find random connections between us, but legit one of my favorite songs.

Leo Laporte [01:34:10]:
Well, we, uh, the radio station, the college radio station I was working at had a gold record because I think they broke that song. They were the first to play it. Strawberry Letterman. Was it— who was it? Was it the Commodores? Who was it?

Doc Rock [01:34:22]:
Oh, well, Brothers Johnson, but the original is Shuggie Otis.

Leo Laporte [01:34:26]:
Shuggie Otis. So this was the Brothers Johnson version.

Doc Rock [01:34:28]:
Brothers Johnson version. We

Leo Laporte [01:34:29]:
didn't have the Shuggie Otis version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really old. I didn't know there was an original.

Doc Rock [01:34:36]:
Yeah, well, and, and be back in the day, they couldn't say this, but Shuggie Otis was a lover of The— what are the, um, it was about a lover thing. And it's, uh, you know, back then they could no way come out and say what they were really about. But yeah, it was a song to a lover.

Leo Laporte [01:34:55]:
All right, you're gonna have to explain that all to me off the air because I don't know if we can still— we can handle that truth. I don't think we can handle it.

Doc Rock [01:35:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:01]:
Also with us, Matthew Castanelliti, the Shortcuts guy. His new company is supercomputer.tech. And boy, you, you picked the right time to focus On Shortcuts and Intents and, uh, and helping, helping people get their apps to use all the capabilities Apple is now building into Siri.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:35:19]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:19]:
When I, when I heard that, uh, that, uh, Jason couldn't be here, I said get Matthew because I want to, I want to hear what this all means. So thank you for being here. I appreciate it. On we go with the program. There's a few other things to talk about. Uh, did you guys last week talk much about the new, uh, Laptops, the new OLED touchscreen laptops. Does anybody have one?

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:41]:
Yep. No, I don't think anybody in the panel had one, but we did talk about them.

Leo Laporte [01:35:44]:
Okay. And Jason is presumably going to get one at some point, or no? And

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:47]:
we'll talk, uh, they're very expensive.

Leo Laporte [01:35:50]:
I looked at them briefly.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:51]:
One might presume. There was, there was an interesting story, however, this week that I was surprised to find out that there is no control to turn— people were really, really excited about, oh my God, finally we have an illuminated Apple logo on the lid again. Yeah, we love that. But the thing is, like, of course a lot of people are in situations where, yeah, I can't have a shining beacon of light like on the back of this device. And unfortunately there's no like setting inside Settings for turning that off. So Apple actually put up a support document with a command line command that you can use to basically disable it or re-enable it. But also in the meantime, somebody came up with this really, really nice utility. It's not my pick of the week because there's a much better pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:36:28]:
I'm scrolling up to find it again. Is it It's called, it's called backglow.app, which lets you turn it off, on and off. But also if you want it to like to pulse with the music or be an indicator— Oh, I like that. To what your AI is doing. Uh, it'll also give you modes like that, which is like, I'm sur— I was surprised that there isn't a setting like that because it's, I bet there's like a couple of people at Cupertino like, oops. Yeah, we probably should have put that in.

Doc Rock [01:36:49]:
Man, listen, as an old school video guy, can I see, really people? Like, come on. Put

Leo Laporte [01:36:56]:
a piece of tape over it. Is that what you're saying?

Doc Rock [01:36:59]:
A little gaffer's tape. Take it off when you don't need it. But when it's time— you watch TV every day, which is funny to me because they put the gaff tape over the Apple logo. Everybody knows it's an Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:37:08]:
I know, it's pretty obvious.

Doc Rock [01:37:09]:
Some product placements don't require covering up. We know a Cadillac when we see one. We know an Apple when we see one.

Leo Laporte [01:37:15]:
Is Apple the only laptop with a notch? I think so. Yeah, nobody else does a notch. That's kind of the giveaway right there.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:37:22]:
Punch out though. It's like not

Leo Laporte [01:37:24]:
The new one's just a punch-out. That's the whole thing.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:37:26]:
Yeah, they got—

Leo Laporte [01:37:27]:
I'm glad they brought the glowing Apple back.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:37:29]:
I think that's a nice touch. And everything too.

Leo Laporte [01:37:31]:
Should we thank John Ternus for that? Is that his doing, you think?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:37:35]:
He's the hardware guy for sure.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:37]:
Yeah, yeah, he definitely wrote up on it. He would— he— it wouldn't be there if he didn't support it.

Leo Laporte [01:37:40]:
Well, I, I'm not gonna buy one. They're way, way expensive. Lisa might. She needs a new laptop. I just don't— I don't need touch. In fact, I specifically— I love OLED I have a Lenovo, uh, X1 Carbon that has OLED, but I bought the one without touch.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:37:55]:
Because I don't wanna touch the screen.

Doc Rock [01:37:57]:
Yeah. That's right. I don't like fingerprints on my screen. I don't wanna touch it at all. Like, I don't know. I can't stand when people touch any screen. So I'm like, definitely I can't do it. Uh, I probably will find a reason to use it later on, but for right now I'm so trained on not wanting to touch the screen.

Doc Rock [01:38:12]:
Like, I think it might drive me nuts.

Leo Laporte [01:38:13]:
Yeah. Oh well. Uh, It's really interesting. Apple has, with all these products, Apple's kind of pushing the envelope. The Duo, the iPad Mini, the touchscreen MacBook. These are all products that I don't know if the market's gonna jump on these or not. We don't know yet, do we?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:38:31]:
It's kind of like something for everyone, but also not like a clear—

Doc Rock [01:38:36]:
No, no, no.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:38:36]:
Yeah, but I should just get this.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:38]:
But also, but the thing is like Apple in their own, in their own communication, the, the Touch kind of was an afterthought in their communication. What the highlight that they were selling is, oh my God, this display, this display, this display.

Leo Laporte [01:38:49]:
I'm sure it's cool.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:50]:
Did I mention how good this display is?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:38:51]:
Why would it not be Touch? Because it's basically the iPad display.

Doc Rock [01:38:54]:
I think one of the things, the cool thing now, um, where they're at right now in their life cycle and, you know, their age, like how long they've been around, like they're 50, so they're in their midlife crisis, right? And so

Leo Laporte [01:39:06]:
now

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:06]:
delivering their keynote to motorcycle jacket and having an affair with Chinese spies.

Doc Rock [01:39:11]:
Let's say now they can have an affair with a Chinese spy, like the whole nine yards.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:39:14]:
Wrong chip, wrong chipset. Uh,

Doc Rock [01:39:16]:
what this allows them to do is to take risk and chances that doesn't matter because at the end of the day they have such a long runway on their bottom line. I know Wall Street Journal was like yapping the fact that, you know, they're still like 400% on certain products. I'm like Listen, man, nobody complains to Louis Vuitton when they do it. How come when Apple does it, it's a different thing? It's called fair market value. And if we keep paying for it, they don't owe us anything to make them cheaper, right? We feel that the value—

Leo Laporte [01:39:47]:
That's my question is, are we gonna keep paying for it? I just don't think those are gonna be big sellers.

Doc Rock [01:39:52]:
When they hit that, they can adjust. There you go. And so that's the point. The point is they can try all these crazy risks. Yeah, they can do things that are seemingly avant-garde or whatever. And then when people— when they hit a point where people change their mind, When they jump the shark, thank you TV people, then they'll have to back up and start again. But they can afford to jump the shark right now.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:40:13]:
One of the interesting things about the touch that I hadn't, I don't think this is why they did this, but I've had the experience of using dictation a lot with my AI tools. And then the only thing I need to do is say like, yes, or continue. And, and touching the screen would be like sufficient for that versus like finding the right key to press on the keyboard. And so I feel like it is interesting as like the future of what we will be doing with these devices. And even like having your computer up on the thing, like just switching apps all might be, I don't know. It's, I think that's why I was saying with the OLED is it's, it already could be touch. So like, why not? There's not like a good reason not to do it. Right.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:40:56]:
Yeah. And

Leo Laporte [01:40:58]:
well, there is a reason, because you have to rewrite the operating system. You have to make a lot of changes to make touch work. Otherwise, all the touch targets are small.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:05]:
But, but even, even there, they didn't do a whole lot. All they did was essentially when your finger is over it, a certain touch target will get a little bit bigger. But they didn't rewrite the UI. They didn't do anything. They— I think they, I think they just did it the right way. If they're— unless they're gonna come up with a tablet, a full-on iPad Pro style tablet Mac, I think they did the right thing for their first outing. Yeah, okay, we've— it makes sense for us to have touch on the screen. We put touch on the screen.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:29]:
Some people are gonna like touch on the screen. If you don't like it, don't worry, you don't have to touch the screen.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:41:32]:
Well, what if your phone could turn into that screen? And I think you were kind of asking for that before, and this is a way that you could have a touch— like the phone could literally be the trackpad. And then,

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:44]:
yeah,

Leo Laporte [01:41:44]:
I mean, I'm skeptical. I

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:47]:
don't— in the new, in the new developer beta for, I think, iPadOS, they added a setting so that if you're using the iPad in continuity mode, you can switch between what does, what does, for instance, a 4-finger swipe do? Does it do the iPadOS thing or does it do the macOS thing? So clearly they're bridging things. They think that's a good idea.

Leo Laporte [01:42:05]:
Yeah. Um, let's see. Watch out if you use homebrew. It turns out that a homebrew hack, I guess it's probably modified homebrew, a supply chain attack is how people were getting into people's Binance accounts and stealing Millions of dollars. Millions of dollars.

Doc Rock [01:42:25]:
Was that on a Mac?

Leo Laporte [01:42:26]:
I love Homebrew.

Doc Rock [01:42:28]:
I live in Homebrew.

Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
Yeah, me too. It's a fake Homebrew installer and it's, it's linked to the—

Doc Rock [01:42:33]:
oh, there you go—

Leo Laporte [01:42:34]:
plus billion-dollar Binance hack.

Doc Rock [01:42:36]:
See, that makes sense. But as everybody started doing their whole, you know, trying to build their own agents and stuff like that, a lot of the things that we needed required you to do things through Homebrew. And so now Homebrew was for us secret people that work in the basement and do our thing. Now it became a little bit more popular for neophytes basically trying to run Hermes or whatever they're running. And so of course somebody puts out a fake homebrew to get you to go there and kind of do it. It's almost like back in the day when, you know, BitTorrent became a thing and, you know, those of us that were smart enough to only use it to download Linux distros, we were fine. But then when people started using it to download, I don't know, Christopher Nolan movies, uh, they started getting the fake BitTorrent ones that were basically letting just direct access to your PC.

Leo Laporte [01:43:26]:
So be careful. Yeah, it's brew.sh. Go to brew.sh.

Doc Rock [01:43:29]:
Period, point blank, end of story.

Leo Laporte [01:43:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. $6.3 billion.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:33]:
It's also a bigger attack vector now because a lot of, a lot of these, uh, criminals are now basically trying to infect AI results by simply saying, oh, oh, you're having a problem. problem, like turning off the Apple logo. Oh, we'll just run this shell script, it'll just do everything fine, when it's actually— no, that is going to install something nasty.

Leo Laporte [01:43:48]:
Yeah, well, be careful out there. Uh, speaking of Christopher Nolan, uh, you want to get the Interstellar Lego set? Careful, you could have 7 years for every wave. Uh, you could really lose some, some important time in this. I like the robot. What is the name of that robot that walks with the 2 legs?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:44:07]:
TARS?

Leo Laporte [01:44:08]:
I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:08]:
He's played by Bill Irwin, which is the most amazing thing.

Leo Laporte [01:44:11]:
Yeah. Yep. He has a great voice. It's a good movie.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:14]:
Yeah. I actually, I put this in the doc because if you scroll to the bottom, the iMac G3 LEGO set is still alive. It's still— LEGO has this thing called— if you can make a proposal, if it gets 10,000 votes, they'll consider it, including considering like, how can we manufacture this? What will the licensing be like? So technically it's in the parking lot, so they're still evaluating. But the thing is, like, it's been— the thing is, there's— it's still on the list, which means that they haven't rejected it.

Leo Laporte [01:44:41]:
Oh yeah, we talked about that. So you could vote for it, and I guess not enough people have yet.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:45]:
Well, no, it has been— it has been voted. It has been voted so much that LEGO is gonna think about it. So, but I'm hoping that one of the things we'll see in the change of leadership is that Ternes has got to want an iMac LEGO on his desk. Come on, John, be cool. Wheels for the mind.

Doc Rock [01:45:03]:
Dude, we need a functioning Lego iPod. Oh, like one that has like a, uh, well, we could put in now like 256 gig chip or, you know, like a micro SD card, but a functioning Lego iPod. That would be the gift.

Leo Laporte [01:45:17]:
Nice.

Doc Rock [01:45:18]:
Because they had Lego iPod before, but now with the ESP32C, uh, screens and stuff that you can easily code up Oh, this would be gangster.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:45:28]:
Just get— I thought you were going to say this iMac Lego, having it be a functional Mac. Like I saw someone, Claude, who's going to do it. Yeah. He has, he made his own mini Mac screen and it runs there.

Doc Rock [01:45:40]:
Fable 5 too, they built a full computer OS in, I think it was 4 days, just letting it, he gave it a prompt and told it to go. And it built like, it works. The, uh, the EFI works, the root, like the whole 9 yards, the whole computer OS. And so yeah, we're definitely getting to the point where you can do things like this. And I found myself at MIT Micro Center a couple weeks back, um, trying to buy ESP32C little screens because you can make it do all kind of cool stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:07]:
Yep.

Doc Rock [01:46:08]:
Like I can know like when a new show starts, I could just have a tiny little screen like glued to my desk.

Leo Laporte [01:46:12]:
I love my ESP32s. I absolutely love them.

Doc Rock [01:46:14]:
Yeah, now you can, you don't have to know how to program it the hard way. No, you can just go buy a—

Leo Laporte [01:46:18]:
He knows all about it.

Doc Rock [01:46:19]:
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
Uh, all right, let's get our picks of the week, and then we will wrap things up because Andy's got to get out of there, get out of Dodge. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Let's kick off the picks of the week this week with Andy and Akko, because you have an appropriate holiday.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:35]:
Yes, every, every holiday season I recommend Patrick Stewart's one-man performance of A Christmas Carol. Now it's— this year it's a little bit extra poignant. Highest possible recommendation for Even before he was cast on Star Trek, he had been developing on his own a one-man show performance of A Christmas Carol, and he performed it live for years and years and years. And he— and it's not just a dramatic reading. It's like, no, he's doing every one of the characters. He does Scrooge? Yes. He does Bob Cratchit? Yes. He does Old Fezziwig? Yes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:05]:
Does he do Tiny Tim? Of course. Does he do the women? Of course he does the women, because he's that versatile. And it is a legitimately enchanting performance from start to finish. And you can get it on Audible. I'm recommending you buy it on CD so that you can rip it and then just simply have it forever and not care about what app you run it on. But it has been— I bought my first copy of this on cassette. Wow. And I will give you— I will give New Englanders a special extra indication of how long ago that was: at Building 19.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:35]:
That's how old it was. And I have had it like— I've— it's been a tradition for about 10 or 20 years ever since. Because

Leo Laporte [01:47:41]:
what's Building 19? Is that at MIT?

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:43]:
Oh my goodness gracious. Okay, Building 19 was a discount store, a chain of salvage insurance stores.

Leo Laporte [01:47:49]:
Like Repo Depot?

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:51]:
Well, no, even better than that. I'll give you— Even better than Repo Depot? Nothing's better. Unfortunately, I have to give you the 2 examples. Of course you would have like, okay, clothes and furniture and stuff like that, but also there was a time in the 1970s when they built like the John Hancock Tower in the middle of Copley Square, designed by I.M. Pei, faced with immense, like, these huge, like, floor-to-ceiling windows. And after they installed them, they figured, oh, these seem to be popping out and falling to the ground, inconveniencing people below. Yes. And they figured out what the problem was, they replaced all of them, and Building 19 bought all of the old windows and sold them as, well, if you want to build a greenhouse out of them, you can do that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:28]:
We can't say which insurance building it came from. The second canonical example of how awesome Building 19 was is the Building 19 wet underwear sale. Stick with me here. Okay, so a lot of the stuff that— again, it's insurance salvage, meaning it was a— it's a total loss. The insurance company owns like this warehouse full of stuff, and so they sell it to whoever's gonna buy it, and Building 19 would buy it. In this case, typical story, fire suppression systems went off in a warehouse, everything got soaking wet, and of course brand new supply of perfect, never worn, brand new manufactured, brand new underwear, and it's sopping wet. And Billy 19 got a great deal on it from the insurance company. And then they were facing the problem of, wait a minute, we've kind of like hosed ourselves because we're gonna have to like have it dried, or else if we— or else by the time it arrives at the stores, like it'll all be, you know, all molding stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:23]:
So they said, no, what if we were to ship it packed in water like tuna or something. They would, and we will set up waiting pools at every single store that's selling it. And we'll sell it by the pound. So basically like a penny a pound, you can wring it out as much as you want. And of course, as soon as you get home, you toss it in the dryer. It's like, oh my God, these people are geniuses at marketing and seizing opportunities.

Doc Rock [01:49:48]:
Oh, they're the best.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:49]:
They are. They've, unfortunately they've gone because of course the internet totally destroyed like salvage stores and stuff like that. But it's still like, legend.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:49:58]:
That's like using every piece of the animal.

Doc Rock [01:50:00]:
Leo, Building 19, um, it's something like, our business is like sex— when it's good, it's wonderful, and when it's bad, it's still pretty good. That's Building 19. Like, they have all kind of crazy—

Leo Laporte [01:50:17]:
How did I not know about this? I grew up in Rhode Island and I never heard of it.

Doc Rock [01:50:21]:
There's a, there's a, um, Burt Reynolds movie Called Building 19? No, no, but it's in, it's in the movie. I forget what movie it is. All right, it's a, it's an old movie, like 1980 or something. Burt Reynolds movie. They even have Burt. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:35]:
Well, get— you can't get it at Building 19, but you can get it on Amazon. Patrick Stewart's A Christmas Carol on audio CD for $14.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:43]:
You will thank me later.

Doc Rock [01:50:45]:
That's super funny.

Leo Laporte [01:50:46]:
Doc Rock, pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:47]:
My pick of the week, actually.

Doc Rock [01:50:48]:
I got one that's— for the first time, I'm gonna do a free pick. Nobody come for me. But this one is a little pluggy. I have a buddy of mine who we recently hired at Ecamm as a tech support person. His name is— I was going to say Matthew Castagnoli. His name is Matthew Stagliano. That's a different Italian name. But when we get people that come in for support, one of the things that we always have to ask them for is like, what kind of computer do you have? You know, what hardware do you have plugged in? We got to try to suss this out.

Doc Rock [01:51:21]:
So Matt came up with this really handy utility called Rig Map. And all you do is you go to your System Profiler and export that file. You drag it into Rig Map. And if you scroll down a little bit, Leo, you'll see where it will lay out what you have.

Leo Laporte [01:51:40]:
Oh, this is cool.

Doc Rock [01:51:41]:
This is incredible. All the CPU you have, like everything. And so what's really cool for us streamer type peoples or anybody, you know, you're doing some agentic AI, you're trying to figure out what's going on. Leo's hurting my eyes. Because it's not in dark mode. But you basically can say there's a thing at the bottom that says optimize, and it'll come up with things like, oh, you have your freaking Temu coffee warmer plugged into a 30-watt Thunderbolt USB-C port where you should optimize this by moving, say, your Osbot camera into that port and put that thing on like the end of a hub because it doesn't require any data transfer. And then, you know, I had already, I've always specialized in this little USB thing that I used to test cables because a big one we have for camera people is you grab some random USB cable and you plug it in and your camera don't work or your data transfers are slow. Like I cut those, I buy all 240-watt, you know, 40 gig per second or faster cables.

Doc Rock [01:52:41]:
So I'd never have the problem of grabbing the wrong cable because all USB-C connectors look alike, similar to what Andy was saying about micro. So this is cool because it would give you things like, oh, Oh, your monitor is tripping because you have it plugged into a port that can't support it, or you probably should upgrade to a stronger hub versus that thing that you bought from Temu. So it's a really good tool just to just have it inspect your system and see what you're doing. It doesn't collect any data or anything. It's 100% free. But it's so handy in helping you figure out problems. If you like it, just buy my man some beer. There's a button to let him buy a beer.

Leo Laporte [01:53:16]:
I'm

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:16]:
just going to jump in and say I need this so badly. And right before the show, I spent 15 minutes figuring out why this mic didn't work because it was plugged into a USB hub that overloaded it.

Leo Laporte [01:53:26]:
So like,

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:26]:
I'm gonna use this exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:53:27]:
Nice.

Doc Rock [01:53:28]:
Yeah, see, Matt, you know all you gotta do is call me and be like, Doc, this ain't working, what the hell's going on?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:32]:
That's true.

Doc Rock [01:53:33]:
Because if I have a stupid shortcuts idea, I am definitely calling you.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:36]:
Hit me

Leo Laporte [01:53:38]:
up. Matthew Castanelli, your pick of the week.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:40]:
Mine is 2 sides of a gaming coin that they have the new Xbox Nano controller, which is like a little mini—

Leo Laporte [01:53:47]:
it's pretty. You know,

Matthew Cassinelli [01:53:48]:
kind of portable one that's sort of pocketable, and then it can connect directly to Wi-Fi so you can play cloud gaming without like as much latency. I'm still not a huge— I don't believe cloud gaming, anyone actually has ever played a real full game through that. But yeah, the other half is just Legends of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch. I played it with my nephew this weekend and got to like teach him the basics of video games. controls and stuff and always amazing. And then I put the link in for that.

Doc Rock [01:54:19]:
Can you plug it into the iPhone, the iMac, or the, um, MacBook to use it as a controller as well?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:54:26]:
The Xbox thing?

Doc Rock [01:54:27]:
Yeah, for sure.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:54:28]:
That's mostly why I got it for like nomads.

Doc Rock [01:54:30]:
I'm an Xbox person, but I've been using DualShock controller and my hands just don't like DualShock controllers. So I would, I'd rather have that and I can travel with it. And I'm thinking about buying a Switch too.

Leo Laporte [01:54:40]:
Yeah, it's really cool.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:54:41]:
I feel like it's perfect for iPhone Duo too.

Leo Laporte [01:54:45]:
And very nice, very nice. We got some good picks this week.

Doc Rock [01:54:48]:
I just typed into Google Xbox Dano, not the same thing.

Leo Laporte [01:54:52]:
And this is the, uh, the little, uh, what is it, uh, ESP32-128K Mac that can actually run macOS?

Matthew Cassinelli [01:55:00]:
Yeah, he set up a little mini version. It's a 3D-printed Mac essentially. Oh, very nice.

Leo Laporte [01:55:07]:
Robert J. Bye on x.com. And, uh, you can get the 3D print files from his—

Doc Rock [01:55:12]:
Made by Bye. Come on. That's awesome. Sorry, Andy. That's better than Inako.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:55:18]:
He should call it Bye Bye Bye.

Leo Laporte [01:55:19]:
Bye Bye Bye. Bye Bye Bye.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:21]:
Let's get, uh, made by BYE collab.

Leo Laporte [01:55:25]:
Thank you guys. Uh, great to have you. Appreciate Matthew Cassinelli coming in to explain Intents. Intensely. It was fascinating stuff. Appreciate it.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:55:35]:
If anyone on Twit is vibe coding apps or has their own apps and wants to talk App Intense, definitely hit me up because I'd love to— I've been on this network before and I, I always— I'll, I'll give you all a discount or something if you—

Leo Laporte [01:55:47]:
Yeah, supercomputer.tech, that's where you go for all of that. Thank you, Matthew.

Matthew Cassinelli [01:55:53]:
It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:55:54]:
Doc Rock, he is at Ecamm where he's Director of Strategic Partnerships, but he's also on YouTube at Doc Rock. And our favorite Ohana member. It's great to see you, Doctor.

Doc Rock [01:56:05]:
Mahalo, brother. I appreciate you. Holla if you need anything from Japan. I'm heading out.

Leo Laporte [01:56:08]:
Are you again? You just got back.

Doc Rock [01:56:11]:
I did just come back, but I'm going back again. I'm legit trying to buy a house.

Leo Laporte [01:56:14]:
Oh, are you moving there or you just want to have a vacation place?

Doc Rock [01:56:17]:
I just want to have a spot to go to because I go so often that hotels is catching up and I'm like, I'm gonna just get a spot. And then with my friends, like, if you guys want to go and I'm not there, hey, Oh,

Leo Laporte [01:56:27]:
where are you gonna get it?

Doc Rock [01:56:29]:
I'm looking at either Fukuoka or Chitose, which is Hokkaido, just because more people need to get away from the busy areas.

Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody goes to Tokyo or it's too much.

Doc Rock [01:56:39]:
Yeah, go somewhere cooler.

Leo Laporte [01:56:40]:
Go somewhere cool. Very nice. Well, I'll be hitting you up. Don't, don't you— how, what's the— how long's the flight? I just got back from 18 hours in the air.

Doc Rock [01:56:49]:
For me, it's about 9-ish hours.

Leo Laporte [01:56:52]:
That's still a lot of flying. That's still a long

Doc Rock [01:56:54]:
But I mean, I fly from Honolulu to Boston all the time to go to work and that's 13 hours.

Leo Laporte [01:56:59]:
Is it? Yeah, about. Holy moly. Okay, so it's closer to go to Japan.

Doc Rock [01:57:04]:
Yeah. And then no traffic from Logan and getting stuck in that damn tunnel, Andy.

Leo Laporte [01:57:08]:
The Big Dig.

Doc Rock [01:57:10]:
Dude, that tunnel's too long.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:10]:
We want you to get used to the experience of being in Boston. If you were to arrive in Boston feeling refreshed and mentally secure, you would not enjoy it as well. You're welcome.

Leo Laporte [01:57:20]:
Andy Ihnatko's website, ihnatko.com. i-h-n-a-t-k-o.com. Become a premium member, support that ink-stained wretch who's doing great, great work. We appreciate all of you. Thank you for joining us. We do the MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC. Thank you to Micah Sargent for filling in for me, uh, while I was gone. I appreciate it.

Leo Laporte [01:57:42]:
Um, Micah and, uh, and Jason, I guess, filled in a little bit and, uh— Did anybody else do the show or is it just— It was all Jason. It was all Jason all the time. All right, Jason's, Jason's good. He deserves a little, little break, a little vacay. Uh, thank you, Jason. I appreciate it. We'll be back, uh, next Tuesday again, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick.

Leo Laporte [01:58:08]:
Of course, club members can watch behind the velvet rope in the club Discord at After the fact, download copies of the show from our website, twit.tv/mbw. You can also go to YouTube. There's a place for the YouTube video dedicated channel. Actually, if you go to youtube.com/twit, you'll find all the shows' dedicated channels. But the easiest thing to do, because it's a podcast, is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Pocket Casts, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. There's audio and the video. Pick it.

Leo Laporte [01:58:36]:
It's free. Enjoy it. And we will see you We'll next time. Bye. see you back here next Tuesday. I am sad to say though, it is my solemn duty to tell you right now, get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next time.