MacBreak Weekly 881, Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell is here with his colorful charts, Andy Ihnatko, with his fabulous dad jokes. And Alex Lindsay with his many ways to spend all your money. This week we'll be talking of course about Jason's colorful charts. The Apple results are in big winners, big losers. I think everybody's a winner when it comes to <laugh> to Apple Stock price. We'll also talk about how Apple saves money in its deals with T S M C, where that money might be going in a deal with ar m and rumors about the iPhone 15 and the M three MacBook Pro that and a whole lot more. Coming up next on Mac Break, weekly

Speaker 2 (00:00:44):
Podcasts you love, From people you trust. This Is Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:51):
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 881, recorded Tuesday, August 8th, 2023. Cookster's Billions MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by my Leo. My Leo Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit, and manage years of important documents, photos, and videos in an offline library hosted on any advice and it's free. Visit myo.com/twit and by ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring, you know, it's hard to attract top talent team up with a hiring partner who understands how tough it is and knows what you need. Ziprecruiter, go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Mac break. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show where we click away at our deepest insecurities. Alex Lindsay's in a hotel and he doesn't like the clicking in the background. Hi, Alex. Hi. It was

Alex Lindsay (00:01:54):
It, it was clicking. It was clicking. It turned out to be my cable, I think. I don't think it was you. <Laugh>. I think if I had a, a longer U s B cable than I expected <laugh>. So we're picking up something. So <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:02:04):
Zero nine zero.media. Alex really gets outta the house. Where are you today?

Alex Lindsay (00:02:08):
I'm in Los Angeles. I'm right across from the LA Convention Center. Oh, we, we have a sea graph, which is the big graphics conference. Oh, yeah. That is going on this week. And so we were at, I had I was at the production summit last Friday and then sea Graph over the next couple days. And, and we're you know, looking at lots of things, a lot of excitement around nerfs, <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. There's a lot of nerfing nerfs going on here. These are neural radiance fields and holy

Leo Laporte (00:02:35):
Moly.

Alex Lindsay (00:02:36):
So everyone's talking about that. That's the big, that's what, that's the big talk of the show. But there's you know, there's a big race between Unity and, and Unreal. And it's very exciting. I know, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
It's cigarette's been around forever. I remember going down in 1992 with Halsey Minor, who was the founder of cnet, and, and he wanted to see what was going on at siggraph. And so I, we flew down. I remember we flew down I think probably from Oakland on a turbo prop and <laugh>. I think Halsey never forgave. He had me book the flight. I guess I was his executive assistant. And he never forgave me for that. So my relationship was, CNET was short-lived thereafter, but I did fly the VR dragon. They had You wore a headset was so big and it had a big cable. This is in

Alex Lindsay (00:03:22):
1982. You were flying a VR

Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
Dragon. 1992, it was hooked up to SS g I probably an Onyx or something like that. Yeah. And you would get on a saddle.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:32):
'Cause and then you'd hold handlebars like you were on a motorcycle and then put the thing on and it was like you were flying a dragon.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:38):
You, you, you probably do that now with like a small laptop or even like a little Oh yeah. If

Leo Laporte (00:03:42):
You don't <laugh>. Oh

Alex Lindsay (00:03:43):
Yeah. It's cutting. I mean, it's, so, it's come so far. There's, you know, they're talking about nearly a hundred core processors and stuff like that. It's

Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
Pretty, it's very cool. What a world we live in also with us, Mr. Andy Ihnatko from WGBH Boston. Hello, Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:01):
Somehow it always comes down to Flying Dragons. Like there was a, there was a time like when SIGGRAPH was all about, Hey, look how quickly we can render this Volkswagen bug, or it went from teapots to Volkswagen bugs to dragons now. And I, I don't know what it is. The, the modern kind.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
Yeah. Well, we are here doing whatever it is we do. If you wanna ride something while you're listening, be my guest. You could close your eyes and imagine a wonderful world of entertainment with, with the four of us surrounding you. Jason Snell would be the fourth. He actually does do would be surround video on his incomparable

Jason Snell (00:04:36):
Podcast. I, I have done that. And of course, this was just another week in the spreadsheet minds for me. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
It's time for color charts.

Jason Snell (00:04:47):
Yeah. You know, apple releases, its earnings. And what do I do? I I immediately tip back the head of William Shakespeare. Flip the button, slide down the pole into the chart cave into

Leo Laporte (00:04:58):
The bat cave

Jason Snell (00:04:59):
Where the charts are made. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
I

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:05):
I'm more, I'm more imagine you like, like like des Despicable me, where like, you go downstairs and there's minions just like a million, like yellow pill shaped things, basically with carrying bars,

Jason Snell (00:05:15):
Carrying, they, they come in six colors. Andy, stay

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
With the

Jason Snell (00:05:18):
Branding. Those. Okay. Come

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
On. Oh, those minions. So I guess let's go to the let's go to the grass, but before we do top line for us, Jason.

Jason Snell (00:05:32):
It depends. I, I'd say that this was a boring quarter for various degrees of boring. Some people have said it was a bad quarter. Some said it was a good quarter.

Leo Laporte (00:05:39):
Stock market said it was a bad quarter because as usual, the analysts made predictions Apple didn't live up to. And so, oh,

Jason Snell (00:05:47):
And it's all priced into the stock. Although, although the Wall Street consensus was that it would be down 1.5% revenue year over year, and it was down 1%. So they actually beat the consensus. But I think as with everything, wall Street there, you know, stock prices are influenced by changes in expectation. And so you get a run up when people expect more than you get. I, I'm not sure how making $20 billion in profit in a quarter is boring, but that's where we are now. They were actually up in profit because interesting little detail. How do you go down in revenue and up in profit? And the answer is they cut their expenses. This is where you see them not hiring and letting, you know, people go via attrition and reducing expenses in a bunch of areas. And therefore they actually went up year over year in profit.

(00:06:31):
Even though they were down a little bit in revenue, they ran a little more efficiently. And this is, I mean, this is also one of the more boring Apple quarters in general. 'cause This is, they, they didn't release any major products and the iPhone isn't out yet. And, you know, and they're a very seasonal company. So in the end it was, you know, more, more services. The services continue to bubble over. Everything else was kind of flat to iPad and Mac were down. Because I think that we're, that we're seeing the effects of people buying iPads and Macs during an immediate aftermath of pandemic lockdowns. And those people have bought them now and they don't need to buy a new one this year. So, you know, again, for various, if you're a, an investor, maybe you have an opinion about the 1% down year over year. It's very hard not to look at $20 billion in profit and say, yeah, I guess they're doing okay.

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:18):
Yeah. And also most of the analysts on all the different quarterly results are, are basically agreeing that people are just buying fewer smartphones. People are buying fewer laptops. And so it's not necessarily a failure of Apple that they're suffering from, from the same effects as everybody else. Yeah. And Tim Cook even acknowledged that it's one of the other reasons is that we had a lot of people still buying M one M one Apple, Silicon Max. And so therefore that was like the starting gate for a new upgrade cycle, that now they're kind of in the middle of as people are waiting for M three and for waiting for their original m ones to age out of the system.

Jason Snell (00:07:50):
And if you see where Apple succeeded versus sort of like having losses, they, they even called it out United States and the Americas in general, but the United States smartphone market is pretty sluggish right now. They are seeing success and growth in lots of other markets, but in the us you know, it's not, it's their most important market in a lot of ways. And it, it's sluggish in the us Is

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:14):
That, is that saturation? Is that what's going on, you

Jason Snell (00:08:17):
Think? Yeah, and, and people may be buying during the last couple of years, pulling ahead tech purchases, but yeah, it's saturated and the phones are so good now that they last a lot longer. That's why Apple starts to do things like have their replacement program. That's why they will pay you. Like my daughter, we bought her a phone when she went to college. She just graduated. We got her a new phone and, and we, we sold back her old phone to Apple for like $200, like a, a, an a substantial amount of money for a four year old phone. So obviously Apple is trying to grease the skids as much as possible for you to upgrade and then taking those and refurbing them and using 'em for parts or recycling them or selling them you know, in another country that doesn't wanna buy a full price iPhone, depending on how you wanna view that. But yeah, I think that's the truth is that they are trying everything they can, but I think we all have smartphones and are all pretty happy with them in the us and that is, you know, it, it, there's still a cycle, right? But it's not a a, an expanding cycle anymore. You're just selling new, new phones to people who already use your phone or company. It's

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
Always a sad moment in father's life when he buys his daughter their last iPhone, <laugh> <laugh>.

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:27):
That's, that's probably not gonna be the last,

Jason Snell (00:09:29):
I love your optimism that I'm not gonna have to be buying her a new phone in four years out of guilt <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (00:09:34):
Yeah. I think that one of the real challenges that's gonna keep on coming up for Apple is that they're making, and, and other companies as well, the hardware is outpacing the software. So for most people do they really need a new computer? Do they really need a new iPhone? Do they really need an iPad? At some point you go, my kids are still using the first iPad 12.9 Pro and they still use it every day, <laugh>, like, when they're at home. So they're, you know, and, and that's the problem is, is that the apps themselves, and this is where Apple has to kind of help developers or developers, but the, the bottom line is, is that the apps themselves are working very well. You know, and I, when I look at buying the Mac minis that I've bought, I expect to be using those for five or 10 years. And now maybe I'll ratchet it down, but they're so powerful that I can do an awful lot with them for an awful long time. And that's a real problem when it comes to cycling.

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:25):
Yeah. They don't, they don't break either. You can drop these things a few times there no moving parts. They don't put that in the Yeah, I mean, I mean, the number of times I've, I've had to buy something because something that's non Apple, because, hey, I need to test this out, and the things overheats and it pops like after a year or two, or I dropped this phone and that was just it. That makes you appreciate the, the quality of apple construction. Forget about innovation, forget about like the technology. Forget about Apple, Silicon it's all about just the, the damn thing is okay to survive life.

Alex Lindsay (00:10:54):
I mean, I, I was, I was working, I was on the phone and working in my pool and I fell into the pool <laugh>, like into the deep <laugh>, so someone heard whoop, and you know, went all the way down, got back out, and I was fairly confident it was gonna work. But I set my phone down, of course, dried it all off, shook it a little bit, hoped it, and within a couple minutes I was back to like, nothing had happened before. Yeah. <laugh>, you know, it just, it's kind of incredible

Leo Laporte (00:11:16):
On the analyst call Tim Cook said yeah, the American sales are flat. That's why China is becoming so important to us. Good thing to remember. And India. And India, yeah. And India, right. Good thing to remember and

Jason Snell (00:11:29):
Yeah. And rest of world. But, but, and yeah, the, the, it's true. Actually, Europe, it's funny when you think about the iPhone, any place where the iPhone is not majority market share, like Europe is a really big opportunity for Apple. Yeah. And that's, you know, the US it's, it's majority market share, right? So it's a lot less of an opportunity there to convert people than it is in Europe, but certainly India and China and other parts of the world that are places where they think they've got a lot of growth potential.

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:55):
Yeah. He, he mention, he did mention this in his, his ma major in his, in his main comments, but there was a q and a question about it. And he of course mentioned he was asked about India and emerging markets and gave up long, long answer about how well, and how much optimism they have for India. But they also called out Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Emirates Brazil, India, Malaysia. So clearly <laugh>, the fact that he was, he had this all in his, on his mind, means that it's like, like most companies who are making phones, they're concerned about the places where they have not managed to sell a phone to literally everybody in the country yet. And there's still a lot of globe left to cover.

Leo Laporte (00:12:30):
Is it, is it is he trying, is it important to him? Is it that he reassure investors? Is he trying to, it sounds a little bit like, Hey, don't worry because we've got all these other markets, it's gonna be okay. Or does he care? Does, I mean, is it his job to reassure the, the, the

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:47):
Street? Well, yeah, that's, that's obvious. That's the whole point of these earnings calls. I mean, he's required, they're, the company's required to do that, but it's also a place where they, they are not,

Leo Laporte (00:12:56):
It's a spin zone. It,

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:56):
It's, it's spin, right? It's spin. That's, I say this every quarter that this is why I love reading the transcripts, because when you see an Apple event for the press and for the consumers, they can, they can maybe leave the y axis, y-axis on a chart unlabeled and hope that you think that that curve means what you think it is. But on a, on an earnings call, like there are major consequences if they like misdirect or if they lie. And so it is a, it is a place for them to, to say frankly to people who are going to have a material effect on Apple in the future. So, yeah. You see, and it's, and it's also, and it's also often a time for, for them to really express, here's what we believe in a company going forward. They're one of the few companies this quarter that spent a lot of time in the prepared remarks talking about just things like diversity, talking about the environment.

(00:13:46):
A lot of that, that seemed to have been in Vogue a year or two ago across all tech. But now Apple seems to be the only people who are gonna spend an entire paragraph of that transcript talking about their, their carbon their carbon initiatives. So yeah, it's, it is a place to raise the flag, but it is also a place to convince people that we are, we're not dopes. We're not gonna buy a social media app and then <laugh> make you wonder why you're putting any money into us. That kind of stuff.

Jason Snell (00:14:12):
I think the, the nature of an Apple investor and, you know, I'm not one, I've never been one, kind of can't be one. I think though they have trained their, most of their investors into thinking that Apple is a long hold, I guess they would call it a hold stock. It is a long game. They're playing. Tim Cook literally, I believe used the phrase long game that the idea that they're looking for the long view in terms of their investment in r and d, which they talked about. The one place that they didn't cut resources is that when they talk, and, and this is a thing that I think they're heading off criticism by talking about why they think their commitment to green tech and green energy and, and carbon being carbon neutral and recycling all of their materials. You know, they, they are tying that in with the idea that this is a long game and those are the investors that they want.

(00:14:57):
Right? They're not, I don't think the bulk of Apple investors are people just popping in and out. 'cause They think there's a good quarter. I think that they look at the position of the iPhone and how profitable it is and say, this is a company that is playing a very long game and is gonna be around and successful for a long time, so that they're not as worried about the vies of sort of like month to month. But they certainly, when they do that call, they, they like to call that stuff out. I think they're trying to sort of define the terms of the argument and say, big picture here, everybody, don't sweat it too much. Because you can get overwhelmed by the, the little details and lose the big picture.

Andy Ihnatko (00:15:32):
Yeah. One, one of my favorite Tim quote Tim Cook moments was when some, I forget whether it was an analyst or an investor who got a little bit surety with him at a meeting about how well you're putting all this money into into environmental stuff and blah, blah blah stuff, and that money should be going to blah, blah, blah. And he said almost as flatly as he possibly could, that we think that we are a really good investment. If you are concerned about that, we invite you to sell your stock. I assure you that people will buy it from you,

Jason Snell (00:16:01):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, another way they blunt the criticism is with, they have been embarking on a policy that, oh my God, I think it's been like 10 years now at least, where they are aggressively buying back stock, which raises stock prices. They are, are, yeah. They returned their dividend, which they didn't use to do. And they officially have made it a policy that they will become, I forget what Luca Misery, the CFO says something like a cash neutral position over time, which is hilarious. 'cause It's been that way for years now. And they can't get there because they make money too fast. They can't get to cash neutral, they cannot spend it as fast as they're bringing it in. I think they have 40 some billion in net cash right now, just in the, in the mattresses. 'cause They've got, you know, they do some stuff with hedging and they've got debt, but they've also got cash. But the net out is I think in the 40 billion range in cash. Wow. So they want to get to neutral, but it's hard to get to neutral when you've made a machine that throws off $20 billion in profit. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
You're making more than a billion a week. You, you really gotta find, it's hard, hard to spend, start buying amusement parks or something. It's a real

Jason Snell (00:17:00):
Brewster's, billions kind of situations there.

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):
Right. <laugh>, how

Jason Snell (00:17:03):
Do I spend it? I dunno.

Alex Lindsay (00:17:04):
<Laugh> and that very much, I mean, we have to also remember that that very much the it stabilizes the stock a lot when, when you're doing dividends, when you're doing buybacks, you know, it, it not just pushes up the stock, but it just stabilizes. So every time up and down people are like, yeah, well I was, but I'm still getting all these dividends <laugh>. Right, right. And and you know, their stock position, I mean, their cash position used to be much higher. So they were in the hundreds of millions of do billion, hundreds,

Leo Laporte (00:17:28):
Billions of dollars. Almost 200 billion. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:17:30):
Yeah. Yeah. And that becomes, that could creates its own problems at some point. And so, so they, by pushing that,

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):
Because a lot of that was offshore and they couldn't, they couldn't spend it in the us Right. So once Trump allowed them to reinstate it I think now they've been able to spend it a little bit more vigorous.

Jason Snell (00:17:48):
Right. But the buy the thing helps their cri insulate them from criticism from investors too. Right? Right. It's like we're, they're using a lot of our profit for that to buy back stock. Borrow, they

Leo Laporte (00:17:56):
Borrow for that. Right. They don't spend their own cash for that. And

Alex Lindsay (00:17:59):
We have to remember,

Jason Snell (00:18:00):
I, they have so much that the, there, there's a lot of, they've got a lot of debt, but they've also got the cash for, it nets out to 40 billion.

Leo Laporte (00:18:06):
They borrow when it was, when it was free money. They may not be borrowing now. 'cause

Alex Lindsay (00:18:09):
The interest, right. They may not be borrowing as much now with the kind of interest rates they're getting now, but the Right the, you know, they're just doing the math, like which, which is the best one <laugh>. And so but, but the the other thing to remember is, is that a lot of the benefactors of this slow push of stock value and so and so forth, when we talk about stockholders, a very large number of stockholders are their employees. You know, so their employees are getting these stock options all the time. And, and so this is something that it's important for most of these companies when, when you see companies lose stock value by 50%, there's a lot of employees that are like, well, that was my retirement mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and now I don't, you know, you know, they look at their, the value of their retirement went down by 50%. So, so it is really important to employees that that stock remains stable or continues to move north. That

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
Was the reason Steve Jobs gave for not going public years ago. He didn't want his employees looking at the stock ticker all the time. Right. One 'em working <laugh>. But it's part of the compensation deal now in Silicon Valley, if you can't offer stock, it's, you're gonna be at a disadvantage hiring the best people. Yeah. And the stock has to be

Andy Ihnatko (00:19:10):
Worth something. Those stock, I'm sorry, although the stock buybacks just quickly are, are becoming a little bit controversial because when you see pushback against like paying your employees better resistance to unionization, things like that, it's, it's, it, it be, it makes a company look not great when you, when they, you have to point to here's how much money you spent buying yourself back. You're saying that you can't afford to, you can't afford like 16 bucks. You can't afford 18 bucks an hour. You can't afford 20 bucks an hour. You can't afford to allow collective organ, collective bargaining, that sort of stuff. It's, it's not like that's a huge problem, but that is, it's, it's becoming more of a fly on the windshield than than it has in the past.

Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
Yeah. Custer should have some betters ways to spend his billions. I think <laugh>, Luke <laugh> Lucas Luca Mery said apple was taking a, does he have an Italian accent? I feel like anybody named Yes, he does. He said, <laugh>, the deliberate approach in the managing our spend, according to this guy, Jason Snell mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in Mac World. He's not,

Jason Snell (00:20:12):
He's not quite quite that Italian guy. This is the Pope, but he's, but he is, and I'll just say the whisper ai speech to text does a great job of transcribing Lumetri. So his English is nice, is spot on

Leo Laporte (00:20:25):
A deliberate approach in managing our spend.

Jason Snell (00:20:28):
Yeah. That, that it's, it's like, yeah. How do you say we are trying to spend less money cut costs. Yeah. But we're not, but we made 20 billion. So like, because they famously, as we've talked about on this show, like they're not doing big layoffs or anything like that, but they wanna send the message that they're being fiscally responsible, which why they do the deliberate slowdown of their expenses, but not, he will point out on several occasions, not r and d. The r and d expenses are actually still pretty high. And they basically say, look, that's what we are as a company is r and d. We have to do that. Which is

Leo Laporte (00:21:00):
Funny. 'cause For years Apple was not a big r and d spender. That's a, that's something relatively new, right? Am I right?

Jason Snell (00:21:08):
Yeah. But it's also, you know, ha getting 20 billion in profit every quarter is also relatively new for them. Right. It's only been in the last 10 years that they've been so huge. And I think they decided like one place to spend that is just Sure. It's like creating this whole cycle of like, put it back into the r and d. So we stay ahead in areas that allow us to keep making money. Hence

Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
Division mean

Alex Lindsay (00:21:26):
What Apple's really. Yeah. And, and what Apple's really doing and potentially the car. But the but what Apple needs to keep doing, doing and what they're doing pretty well is not really looking for how do we make easy profits, but how do we do things? How do we build products in a way that are hard <laugh>, you know, like, how do we make everybody else Yeah. Play a game that they can't afford to play? Oh, that's interesting. So the r d ah, you know, so the r and d helps keep pushing that, that and making it much harder for everyone else in comparison. Because they're just playing a game that you, if you, you, if you don't have $20 billion to get into this poker game then you need to move somewhere else,

Jason Snell (00:22:01):
Right? Like Apple Silicon's a great example of that, where they put in time and the money, they bought P pa semi, but they also did a multi-year process where it's not cheap to design your own chips year after year after year. And then also pay T Ss M C to build factories in order to build them and to put you on their new three nanometer process. Like it costs a fortune, but it's another one of those places that's a bulwark against the competition, right? Like fundamentally, that's a huge advantage for them that they didn't have when they were relying on other people's chips. And it was worth them spending that money for that.

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
In fact, that's one of the stories of the week that T Ss m C has basically allocated every <laugh>, every chip they've got to apple for the next year. And and

Jason Snell (00:22:43):
Remember when they did that with flash memory? Yeah. It's the same thing when the iPod was all flash-based and everybody wanted to compete with the iPod. One of the huge pro, it wasn't just competing with Apple. You had on, on a product level with consumers. You had to compete with Apple to get the flash memory to put in your players because Apple did these like four, five year contracts where they just bought it all and everybody else got into the back of the line. And that

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:05):
Is according to such a historic, that's, that's such a historic play. 'cause That's the, the, the, even the iPod, like there was only one place you could get that Toshiba mini microbe mechanical hard drive mechanism and Apple lock

Jason Snell (00:23:17):
That. Yeah. We'll take them all. <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:19):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
According to Wayne Ma in the information, one of the deals Apple has made with T S M C is that T S M C pays for the defects. They eat the cost of defects that crop up in the new manufacturing process. And, and so this is, this is the story is how Apple will save billions of dollars on chips for the new iPhone. So it really, you know, it, it T S M C needs apple as much as Apple needs. T S M C. Clearly they're making a, a, a sweetheart deal to Apple. Yeah. According to tsc. I mean, Apple's

Jason Snell (00:23:54):
Also go ahead funding the building of these factories that will eventually, they just will get to use on other products for other people. Right. So it's a good deal for everyone.

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
I think Ma Ma quotes Brent Sipson, a partner at technology research firm, ATI Research who says Apple and T S M C is the best strategic relationship in all of tech. Nothing comes close to their win-win strategy. It's good, it's good for both. So very interesting. I believe

Jason Snell (00:24:22):
It AP Apple has a, has a real track record with get, making good deals with chip makers. I don't know next week we'll probably save this for next week. 'cause Next week is the 25th anniversary of the iMac, I think. Wow. wow. But famously or at least semi famously, one of the reasons the iMac worked it all is that they strong armed, no pun intended, Motorola <laugh> to give them a super sweet deal on the G three for the iMac because they were the, it was not feasible with the list price of the G three and a bunch of people, including I think Greg Jozwiak, who's now Apples Head of Marketing went to Motorola and basically talked them into a deal that I think Motorola instantly regretted in order to get that chip for a, for a low price. So it's, it's fascinating when your Apple, I mean, they've never made their own chips. They designed them, but they, they've never made them. So you gotta, right, you gotta get the silicon price right. Or your product falls apart. So they're still doing

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
ITM points out that whenever you have a new node, like the three nanometer node, you're gonna have huge defects. He says, yeah, the yield on the three nanometer wafers is 70 80%, which means that 20 to 30% of them are no good. And that TSMC is basically eating it. Normal customers will buy the wafer including the bad, you know dyes on it, but Apple doesn't have to pay for them. They only pay for known good dyes.

Jason Snell (00:25:49):
Maybe a short term deal, maybe, you know, over time it'll be different. Also, I'll point out, I hadn't really thought about this before, but a lot of the variation that we see in Apple's chips is binning. Right? Right. It's, it's a, a chip that does not qualify for everything, and that's why it's got fewer GPUs or fewer CPUs. And that's how they have different variations of the, the pro and the max and the regular chip and all of that. I wonder if we'll see more of that in this generation, in the M three generation. I, I, I don't know how, you know, when a, when a chip goes bad in this process, is it just sort of dead or are they gonna end up with a certain number that are just, you know iffy, but that they can be used at a lower level? Because we may see a lot more of that if that's the case. Well,

Alex Lindsay (00:26:31):
We, when we think about that also, that, you know, the, the, they usually just aren't performing at the level that they were speced at. Right? So oftentimes with the chips, you have chips that are faster, are the ones that you know, and then the ones they just don't, they start to not work as well at a certain speed, and so they pull it back into a safe speed. But those chips are you know, we just have to remember that those chips could be used for other things. They're just not as fast as the M one and the spec. You know, you have, you have hardware, you know, other Apple hardware that's using M one silicon that potentially could be using those chips as well. So, so it's there, there's a lot of interesting opportunities

Leo Laporte (00:27:07):
There. The only other people buying three nanometer chips from T S M C are, is Intel. And that will happen at the earliest next year. Intel is paying for the three out of 10 dyes that don't work. <Laugh>, sorry, Intel <laugh>. Because,

Andy Ihnatko (00:27:22):
Well, because, well, that, that's okay for Intel because they have multiple channels so that they can basically take, they can basically downgrade they can down downgrade A C P U and sell it as something else, but ba but basically by basically saying that the stuff that's defective and doesn't work well, that's not part of it. So you're not gonna be able to use that. Well, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:27:39):
Really curious what known good chip means that if the, if they're not good, they're not working at all, or if they're merely gonna have to be banned. So we don't know that from Wayne's story in the information. I'll look at that. Yeah. But we,

Andy Ihnatko (00:27:50):
We, we see that all across the supply chain. There are, there are panels that, but there's always been

Leo Laporte (00:27:53):
Buy that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So but whether that Benning is the 30% that have failed or is it the 70% that they bought but just are up to snuff. But,

Jason Snell (00:28:03):
But Apple, another, another way that Apple always eats first, right? That's the, Andy, you made the point. Apple, apple eats first. I love it. <Laugh>. So, so often it's like, well, we made all these panels and Apple, we made a thousand panels. And Apple comes in and says, we'll take these 600. Yeah. And where do the 400 others go? They go everywhere else, right? Yeah. They go to that LG panel, or, I mean, LG also eats first 'cause they made them, but like, that's what you see in Adele panel or a something else. And that's been the case for a long time too, that Apple likes to be at the front of the line, that stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:28:31):
So we have two choices. The for show titles, it could be Apple Leads First or suck it Intel <laugh>. We'll, we'll decide at the end of the sh at the end of the show. The big, the big story according to the press was the increase in services. It was a very smart move for Apple to start focusing on service revenue. And it has been steadily. And it,

Alex Lindsay (00:28:51):
And it takes a long, and it takes a long time to do that. Like it's, it is, this isn't something like, oh, we need to make more money, let's go do that right now. I mean, this is, if you look at this, this takes years and years and years to slowly build up all of these services. Make sure that they, each one's working before you, or mostly working before you open to the next one. So you could tell that they, they knew that this was going to come where they needed to keep buffering. They need to keep pushing that iPhone, you know, part of the pie down, you know, and I think you're gonna keep on seeing them look for all the opportunities they can to get that thing down to less than 30%.

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:22):
Yeah. And that's, that's what, that's something that a company that's worth that much money, they've got the, the financial punching power to hold on like that. Even Google, like the, the, the joke every single quarter with, with Google's call was, okay, how many hundreds we, the, the, we've got great news about the Google Cloud services. We had our best quarter ever. We only lost $400 million because this has been years and years and years of not only developing technology and finding clients, but actually buying real estate, building out facilities. And this quarter was the, the first time it was actually good news that, well, actually, we actually made hundreds of millions of dollars on cloud. And so once you clear that hurdle, you start to get to the point where now most of what we do is it's, it's like, it's like the joke about the first pill when you develop a pharmaceutical company costs like a billion dollars, but every, every other pill after that is nothing but profit. And this is Apple's gonna be making more money per dollar they put in. Now after this for, for other cloud services,

Jason Snell (00:30:14):
You talk about the long game. This is one of those cases where 10 years ago, I think they started talking about services and, and, and saying that our goal is to reach some financial goal that they blew past in a very short amount of time. But you see this here where it just keeps going up. They talked about the number of subscriptions they've got, and that includes like subscriptions in app as well as theirs. It's not just applet sub TV subscriptions, but this quarter they passed a billion subscriptions. And if that doesn't impress you, it's up 15% year over year. And it's doubled in the last three years. The number of subscriptions that they take, and that includes, again, includes app, in app subscriptions. It's not just Apple. Apple views that as its entire ecosystem. Right. But still, you get the sense like, this is why the services growth is so huge. They have, they have laid this foundation. And as they also point out, they, they see a lot of growth in the install base when we talk about like reselling that old iPhone that if the old iPhone stays in service and somebody buys a new iPhone, that's one more person using an Apple device. And so their total number of devices is increasing, which allows them to sell more services to every single one of those devices. And it just keeps on rolling. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:31:24):
Should point. And if q and a and q and a Luca pointed out that one of the advantages of services is that it's consistent. It does. It doesn't keep fluctuating up and down once they got 'em, they keep, they stay got, yeah.

Jason Snell (00:31:32):
So so much of the hardware business is seasonal. Right? But that, but services is not because you, once you subscribe, you're on that, that subscription. And that's that's where it is also very profitable. The Apple set a quarter, third quarter record for its profit margin this quarter. Luca my street, very proud of that. An analyst was like, Luca, I noticed that the profit margin is pretty high, maybe the highest we've seen. And he said it was one of those moments of like, oh, I'm so glad you noticed. Yes, <laugh>, it was 45%. It, it's just enormous. And the reason is the hardware profit margins are less, they're good. They're about as good as you get in the industry, but they're not services profit margins, which are huge. And so the more services are in the mix, the more profitable you are as a

Leo Laporte (00:32:13):
Company. There's one service that has a hundred percent profit, and that's the money that Google pays them every year for <laugh>. The default search on Safari, it's estimated now that it's 15 billion, apple made about 83 billion last year in services. 15 billion is a big significant portion of that. Not that that's in jeopardy, although every once in a while Google kind of complaints about it, <laugh>, <laugh>, but Google is not gonna stop paying that money.

Jason Snell (00:32:44):
Well, I mean, they're making, they're making money on that, right? <Laugh>? Yeah. Like they're making so much money that they can pay. Yeah. They can afford an affiliate fee to Apple for it. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:32:53):
I guess there is always though the risk with services that they could get their percentage cut as you were referring to, or is it the EU could say, you can't, you have to stop, you know, letting Google be the default. Something like that. There's always threats to this all regulatory though. Not, not commercial, all regulatory threats.

Alex Lindsay (00:33:12):
Yeah. And, and really apple's, I mean, I think that we're gonna keep on seeing the situation that a regulatory issues and, and antitrust issues are apple's number one problem in the next decade. Yeah. Those are the headwinds. Yeah. It's not gonna be competing with, with anybody else. It's the fact that they're starting to

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
Pull away. Yeah. iPhone still is the lion's share of revenue. Although services is number two, which is interesting. Then wearables, it's kind of sad for me that Apple, which was the Mac company for so long a computer company that Mac is a small percentage, not much more than the iPad actually, of their overall revenues, but they're not getting that either business. I presumes

Jason Snell (00:33:51):
Well, yeah, but you look at it, I mean, you gotta keep in mind how huge the iPhone business is and how huge the services business is becoming. Yeah. Right? 'cause If you look at, at the Mac, it's still doing, I mean, it's still like a 30 or $40 billion a year revenue

Leo Laporte (00:34:05):
Business. Okay. Well, that, I'll take it then. That's okay. It's, it's

Jason Snell (00:34:06):
Huge. It's just not huge compared to the iPhone. Right. This is the challenge for the Mac and the iPad is that they're never gonna match the iPhone. They're, they're just not, they're never gonna match it.

Andy Ihnatko (00:34:15):
Yeah. And, and also, also anything running a desktop oss, that's the, that's, I think that's one of the most volatile categories of all. Because how, when does somebody decide that they need to replace their their laptop or their desktop? They're not dropping these things in toilets, <laugh>, unless it's, unless it's quite deliberately. And the most and so much of the job of that, that device is being taken up by the new tablet they buy by the new phone they buy. So that's just life on planet earth in 2023.

Leo Laporte (00:34:41):
The the bar, the line chart you made for AAL regional year over year growth tells the story that we were talking about India and China. EMEA includes India. So that's the yellow line. The red line is China. The green line is America's, and while it went up a little bit, it's been trending down for some time. So and China really is growing rapidly. Is that all phone? I guess it must be.

Jason Snell (00:35:07):
Oh, it's not. I mean, the, the phone is the, their way in. But Apple has said repeatedly that in China, one of the things that they consider the most encouraging is that the phone becomes a gateway. And like two or three quarters of all the, all the apple Watch buyers this year, or this quarter word brand new to Apple Watch. Oh, interesting. It's an iPhone accessory, right. So that's, that's one way you get them to buy that second Apple device. But they have said in past quarters too that China keeps setting records for Max sales all time records for max sales and all time records for iPad. And so the, there, the narrative at least, and there's some data to back this up, is that people, like we saw here with the iPod and then later the iPhone, you get that one Apple device, and that is a crack that they can like, push into and get you a whole bunch of other Apple devices once you're sort of like in their ecosystem a little bit. So it sounds like they're doing, I mean, again, it's never gonna be the iPhone, but that the, there's a real opportunity for them in China with their other products too.

Leo Laporte (00:36:05):
Anything else that we learn, whether from the analyst call or the numbers themselves? Anything, any other insights you wanna share before we move on?

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:13):
Not necessarily insights, but there's, I think there's only one, one question about Vision Pro. I was very, I was surprised that it didn't appear in part of Apple's opening comments that oftentimes the opening comments of a, of a tech companies quarterly call are about RA waving the flag on projects that they think they think are high profile and a source of, like, company Pride wasn't there? An analyst asked about it, said, oh yeah, no, I'm using it every single day. Tim Cook said he uses it every day. Again, they won't say what what Apple TV program that he's watching on the, on Vision Pro every single day, <laugh>. 'cause That would probably be the reason why, but Well,

Alex Lindsay (00:36:49):
And, and I think that there's not, I think there's nothing that's, until it starts to ship or until you start to see developers put out more tests, it's really not. They've, they've kind of, there's nothing

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
To say. Yeah, they

Alex Lindsay (00:36:59):
Shot that powder. There's nothing to, there's nothing I think, new to talk about until they have something to, to show. Yeah. The cap shown,

Andy Ihnatko (00:37:05):
Not that, not that they would be, but just, just that it was, it was, it's interesting since, since we spend like all of like the past two or three weeks reading every single analyst call it's us, it's, it's oftentimes a way to see, well, why, why did they decide to use some of that time for the c e o to have open comments? What it really is like when you, when you are watching to see in the old in, in Mayday parades, who is, who is sitting, standing right next to the Soviet premier who has been moved to the outside, we get an idea of where the power is. So it was just, it was just kind of odd gi given that, again, their their environmental initiatives, their social initiatives were enough to spend several sentences on that. At least not, oh, we're very proud of our new innovations that are coming in the future, such as blah, blah, blah. That's, yeah, I just thought it was notable. If not,

Leo Laporte (00:37:53):
I will read the quote Tim Cook said, there's enormous excitement around the Vision Pro. We're excited internally. Everybody that's been through the demos are blown away. Whether you're talking about press or analysts or developers, we're now shipping units to the developer community for them to bing in working on their apps. And we're looking forward to shipping early next year. We could not be more excited with that. Here's the, here's the funny sentence though. The interesting one. I'm using the product Daily

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:20):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:38:20):
Do you think he straps on the Vision Pro every day?

Jason Snell (00:38:24):
Like Andy said, he's, is he watching just a, the new, the new dailies from the Apple tv show that's being worked on that week or,

Alex Lindsay (00:38:32):
Well, and also

Jason Snell (00:38:32):
Doesn't mean bring those in.

Alex Lindsay (00:38:33):
Is he doing that at home for fun? Or is he reviewing where things are going? So you have, you know, there things bubble up to Tim,

Leo Laporte (00:38:40):
You know, to executives. It's time for your vision Pro briefing strap in. But yeah,

Alex Lindsay (00:38:43):
I mean, it's not, not not real. I mean, like, they can say like, this is what numbers is gonna look like in vision or, or you know, this is what, Hey, we've got something for you. And for him to just constantly see that progress. I doubt

Leo Laporte (00:38:53):
He looks at the iPhone 15 daily. Maybe he does. Here's

Jason Snell (00:38:59):
The latest samples. Oh, it's in his pocket. So he probably, he probably does

Alex Lindsay (00:39:03):
In his pocket. Exactly.

Jason Snell (00:39:05):
But yeah, Danny's point, I mean, I think they did, having listened to a lot of these calls over the years, I think they did what they needed to do for a brand new product that's been announced and isn't shipping, which is it, it got a paragraph in that opening prepared remark that the c e O says, and they don't really have, they could have mentioned the developer stuff, but they, you know, they did the thing about, we announced this thing and it's amazing and it's gonna blow you away, and it's the most advanced thing ever made. And that's all they have to say. And then they just moved on to the rest of stuff. The one, the one, I don't know if it qualifies as an insight, you can be the judge that I had of this, is that they always talk about how proud they are of the fact that, like I mentioned, three quarters of Apple watches were sold to New Apple Watch users.

(00:39:40):
Slightly more than half of new iPads sold were to people who'd never bought an iPad before. Slightly less than half of New Mac sold were to people who never bought a Mac before. It's something to boast about. They're growing their market. That's nice. But it struck me that when you have a situation when your existing install base doesn't need to upgrade, that's when those numbers go up. Right? That's when the numbers are of switchers, people who are due to the platform go up. Yes. Because, because the people who are not buying are people who already bought your product last year and don't need to buy a new one because it's an, you know, apple silicon, and it's great. Now, why would I update? I'll see you in four years. Good. Point. Point. So it's, it's a nice thing to boast about, but it's also kind of a proxy for how many people are buying a new Mac who already have a Mac and are upgrading. And if that number of new to Mac goes up too much, that means nobody's upgrading, which is not great either. That's

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
A very, that's an excellent point. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:40:39):
And again, I think, again, it comes back to the fact that a lot of people don't feel like they need to. They don't feel like they need the newest version because the software the, the tools are vastly outstripped by the hardware, the, there, there's just not a lot of reasons to upgrade right now with a phone. The primary reason to upgrade, everyone looks at what, what is the camera going to do? <Laugh>, like, you know, what's the new thing with the camera? And then they make a decision about whether they, they upgrade. I don't think there's very little on the phone that gets people excited more than just looking at the camera update.

Leo Laporte (00:41:08):
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I think you will be too. And it's free. No reason not to try it. Alright, let's talk about the iPhone 15. Mark Germond says it will now. I don't know how, you know, accurate. He is, I think he's probably projecting rather than from an informant, but it's a reasonable projection, the kind we make every year that I, apple will have an event probably on the 12th or 11th and ship the phone on the 22nd. Iphone 15. Hey, that's coming up. That's about a month off. Woo-Hoo. The 11th is a Monday, the week after Labor Day. This is why I think he's coming up with this date. It's the first opportunity Apple could do it. The 12th is a Tuesday. Labor Day is on the fourth this year, so you're not gonna do it on that week. And

Alex Lindsay (00:47:02):
Apple has done it in the past that we <laugh>, but that's true. It's probably unlikely that they have, but they have done it right after Labor Day. Yeah. It's a really expensive thing to do because, you know, you, you have when you're, it's probably, you know, less expensive now 'cause you're playing a movie. So they could probably put it, it's a lot more portable in the past when it's been something that was a live event. Anytime you do a live event anywhere, you end up with a lot of crews. And oftentimes a lot of those crews are union and there's all kinds of rules about what they're getting paid over the weekend and on Sunday. And I'm definitely on Monday. And so usually when you see people do a day after Labor Day, you're like, wow, there's Alex, they're big spenders.

Leo Laporte (00:47:36):
Alex speaks as if he knows what's <laugh>. The

Alex Lindsay (00:47:40):
Dates are No, I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte (00:47:41):
No, you know, I've seen, I know I do

Alex Lindsay (00:47:42):
A lot of Labor Day. I've done a lot of Labor Day events. Yeah, exactly. And, and I you know, over the years there's been 10, 15 years of Labor Day events. I, I never, I haven't had a Labor Labor Day off in a long time. <Laugh> Anyway, so but it costs, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
And I think that's reasonable,

Alex Lindsay (00:47:55):
But it's really expensive. You always have to explain to clients that it's like, oh, the, you know, that's gonna be Yeah. You know, two x the, the labor cost that you'd have before. So usually they move it out.

Leo Laporte (00:48:04):
So the 11th, 12th is, is the kind of thing you would say. Just we would say even just kind of looking at the calendar. That's that's a reasonable place. Yep.

Alex Lindsay (00:48:11):
Yeah, it's a reasonable place to

Jason Snell (00:48:11):
Put it. I think. I, I don't know. I mean, they, they, it's reasonable, but it's not the pattern. The pattern has been Labor Day Week for the last few years. So this is a, he says, told, and I think does have a source. And

Leo Laporte (00:48:21):
I'm looking, I'm looking at the actual Bloomberg Power on Newsletter. Yes. He says, yeah, he told, I'm told. So he does have a source. We'll go on Sailor September 22nd

Jason Snell (00:48:32):
And nine also has a source. So, so there's a, this, a second report from nine to five Mac that also said same, the same thing, which is, I think they said the 13th Mark says the 12th or the 13th, which

Leo Laporte (00:48:40):
Okay. Not the 11th

Jason Snell (00:48:41):
On Wednesday the 12th. In the past they've done the Wednesday events. Only when the Monday's a holiday. Right. So if, if, if they're doing it the week after Labor Day, I would think they'd do it on the Tuesday the 12th. But who knows?

Alex Lindsay (00:48:52):
And, and you know, again, because they're playing a movie, it's a lot less. I mean, there's so much less Yeah. Moving parts. Yeah. They

Jason Snell (00:48:58):
Just got an invitation list. Right. They gotta get people there and, and, yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:49:01):
Yeah. Yeah. So he's gotta give people time to do it. And so then they look at also the, the travel against those weekends as well of press has to come in. Is that, do they wanna put them into a position where they have to all fly during a really heavy zone? So, so

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
Look

Alex Lindsay (00:49:14):
For your, think

Leo Laporte (00:49:15):
That's also, look for your invite on Labor Day or the day after September 4th or fifth. <Laugh>

Alex Lindsay (00:49:20):
<Laugh> probably two weeks. Right? Do they

Leo Laporte (00:49:21):
Usually send home, oh, do they do two weeks now? Jason hopeful when Home gets an invite. So sometimes,

Jason Snell (00:49:25):
Sometimes

Alex Lindsay (00:49:26):
Don't get any invite. They do. I I just, if

Jason Snell (00:49:28):
It's in person, it's two weeks, usually two

Alex Lindsay (00:49:29):
Weeks. That's my observation of when Jason gets an invite and I go, wow, it'd be really

Leo Laporte (00:49:34):
Great. Well, if it's two weeks, that means you'll be getting an invite. Probably in, in three weeks on the 28th or 29th.

Jason Snell (00:49:43):
Yeah, we're getting

Leo Laporte (00:49:43):
Closer. We're getting closer through What, so everybody in two, in two Mac break, weeklys just look deeply into Jason's eyes. And C

Jason Snell (00:49:52):
It's not a secret. Oh, it is. It's not a

Alex Lindsay (00:49:54):
Secret on X. It's Twitter, X, whatever

Leo Laporte (00:49:57):
That X whatever we call that. Twix. Twix. I like that. Twix.

Alex Lindsay (00:50:02):
Twix.

Leo Laporte (00:50:02):
Oh, what I'm gonna Twix is perfect. Thank you, Andy. And

Alex Lindsay (00:50:05):
There'll be another lawsuit. They went from, they went, they get, they get sued for one name, and then they move to another one. They're like,

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:11):
Oh, well, it's, it's, it's adorable. You think that the CEO e o still actually thinks more than two, more than one step ahead of us. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:50:18):
<Laugh>. So it, we, we, I think settled on, we know the iPhone was manufactured in its tests that it manufacture for real will begin any day now. So we pretty much settled on, we think what we think the iPhone 15 will, will be, right?

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:38):
No, yeah. We're looking forward to a, a, a more a, a Periscope camera maybe better display technology on the pro, on the

Leo Laporte (00:50:45):
Pro model, on the, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:46):
On

Jason Snell (00:50:46):
The pro. And, and that's, that's the one that matters, right? That's the one where they make the biggest everything then trickles down from there. So the,

Leo Laporte (00:50:52):
This is the one, the iPhone potentially about the iPhone 15, nothing will be kind of the iPhone Pro 14 pro max of today. Ish. Ish. And then the, the 15 pro will be whatever the next thing is. And that's the thin bezels and the titanium frame

Jason Snell (00:51:07):
Titanium and maybe curve back better upgraded camera. Maybe a Periscope camera. I mean, this could be the one this, right? This could be a substantial upgrade more than the last couple of years. That is the thing that Apple always looks to, to, to get those results back up in the stratosphere.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Because the pro will have a three nanometer processor, probably, right? The A 17.

Jason Snell (00:51:30):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
That'll be, maybe that stuff. There's maybe not the iPhone 15. Nothing. That'll probably be the last year's processor. Right.

Jason Snell (00:51:37):
And don't forget the the the bezels are gonna come in by a noticeable amount too. So it does start to feel like, you know, it's gonna be a substantial update. It will be a bigger update than the last two years. For sure. Yeah. The question is always, will that be enough to motivate people? 'cause That is, that is how Apple always takes their results to the next level. Right? We talk about they almost did, you know, whatever, it's 90 or 80 ish billion dollars when it's not the holiday quarter. But, you know, three years ago they were in the 60 ish range, and then they do a new iPhone that's substantially new and everything just kind of goes up and then plateaus again. Yeah. So this might be that phone that they're hoping will drive lots of new sales, lots of new customers. It's starting to shape up that way though. I mean, the, the rumors are not that, there's a couple minor changes. I think that pro phone is gonna, is gonna be substantially different than the last couple of years of pro phones.

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:30):
Yeah. And, and we're also all on turn hooks to figure out, is this gonna be the release that has U S B C instead of Lightning? Yeah. Or they're gonna hold that article

Leo Laporte (00:52:37):
Next year almost. Don't we know that? I mean, it must be, think it'll be

Jason Snell (00:52:39):
This year. Yeah. Should be. Everybody's saying that's this year too. Yeah. Should

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:42):
There's, there's some leaked images online that supposedly, supposedly shows here is a, here's a component that has the S B C charger in it with what looks like an updated updated bottom frame at this. This is, this is the point which looking at pictures like these gets tricky because it is early. It is close enough to a launch date that you would expect that the, that the chain of secrecy has to, has to sort of be broken in order to just get hardware into people's hands to that people need to see at this point. But it could still just be, Hey, there's someone who's trying to get clicks. But yeah, I mean, this Apple seems to have thrown in the towel on U S B C charging, so why not? Sooner rather than later.

Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Yeah. that would be, you know, it's funny, that's one of the upgrades that might be controversial. 'cause People have so much investment in lightning.

Alex Lindsay (00:53:29):
I don't know. I don't know if they, I was thinking about that last night. I was looking through all the cables that I have laying around now, and I'm almost all U SS B C I have a couple odd I have, even my, even my like watch charger is going to A U S B C outlet. I mean, the U S B A feels really old. I have two lightning cables that I travel with. I, because when I'm traveling, I really am clear, like, what do I bring that I need? And so I've got a couple lightning cables. And so I really, you know, I think Apple has hung out for quite some time, but my entire infrastructure now as U S B C, not, not lightning. So I don't know if it would impact as many people as it would've 2, 3, 4 years ago. It would've definitely impacted a lot of people because they were, a lot of devices were still on that. But I think that as it drags out, a lot of us have, have already put U S B C into everything else. It's

Andy Ihnatko (00:54:16):
Just super weird for them to have S B C iPads and S B C MacBooks and make Oh, well, literally, this is, this one device is why we absolutely must have lightning. That's,

Jason Snell (00:54:24):
I I feel like the fact that the adapters are all U S B A or C already, and that really, this is a cable swap makes this potentially a lot less painful. Yeah. And so many people have collected U S B C devices over the years that I just think I, you know, there will be people who will complain, be complain, and there'll be people who bought hotel chains that bought, you know, <laugh> like they did with the dock connector, all these plastic things that have a lightning thing in the center that's perfectly set. That's like, well, you can't use those anymore. But I, I think this is gonna go down a lot easier than the last one. Honestly,

Leo Laporte (00:54:59):
I still go to hotels that have clock radios with 30 pin and docks on them. <Laugh>.

Jason Snell (00:55:03):
Oh yeah. Me too. Me too. I think I also, I think going to a non-proprietary connector, right? 'cause The dock connector went to the, to the lightning. Yeah. And so it was not something you had around, you had to buy it when you went to Lightning. U S B C. Not everybody, but like lots of people have U S B C devices already of various kinds. And so they're, and they've got those cables laying around. So it's not quite, I just don't think it's gonna be as big a thing. But yeah, certainly some mid-list standup comedian is gonna have a tight five about how annoying it is that they lost their lightning connector. It's fine. Like, what's next? U S B E <laugh> and, you know, whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Well, you just wrote the routine for him. Jason. Good job

Jason Snell (00:55:42):
Was not hard. <Laugh>. Yeah. That wasn't the type five. You gotta expand a little bit of that. You gotta, we're working some color

Leo Laporte (00:55:46):
On my, all you need is that I was with my

Jason Snell (00:55:48):
Kids at the hotel, and I, I'm trying to play some music on the iPhones and my kid will fall asleep. It was like, geez, what's this

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
Connector here? Film already has four pages of, of yellow pad notes on his bill. <Laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (00:56:00):
You know, I'm, I'm just surprised at what they put in a hotel. I'm in a hotel room right now, and I, I am surprised that I'm, like, there's still a TV that's so quaint. Like I, I don't remember the last time I turned a TV on.

Leo Laporte (00:56:08):
Well, but nowadays TVs have Chromecast on 'em and or airplane on, I mean, oh yeah. They're getting a little better. Where you at least can tell your device, can tell the TV what to, what to play. We can, some of us like big screens,

Jason Snell (00:56:19):
Think about,

Alex Lindsay (00:56:20):
Yeah, I just, when I'm traveling, I guess I'm quite happy. My little, my iPad and I just turn it on. And it's really, the problem is that the quality of the, of the color on the iPad is so much higher than the tv.

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):
I'll tell you what the what the thing is, you're traveling alone. 'cause When I travel with my wife, I need a bigger screen so we can li and we're not gonna lie in bed. We have, and it's no fun lying in bed watching a laptop or an iPad. We have done that, but I have to prop it on a pill. It's just

Alex Lindsay (00:56:43):
Not that. I think when I'm traveling so much, I get, I get in from whatever I'm doing, and then I go to sleep <laugh>, and then I get up and I start, you work

Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Again. I play

Alex Lindsay (00:56:51):
Well work. Or, or you like Yeah. It's at these kind of events. You know, we, we got You're exhausted. I was, yeah. I'm, I'm here with a friend of mine Fred, who's a, who's a, one of the top surveyors in the world. And we went down to the bar and we were sitting there talking and this guy next to us just kind of hanging out and having, having his drink. And I asked him what he does, you know, he just, and he just looks, he looks like, he looked like he you know you know, was a trucker or something, you know, he just said, just, and he goes, oh, I, I vir, I, I'm, I'm Heather at this conference called Craf. And I'm like, what do you do? And he is like, I do the virtual, I do the the virtual simulations for the lu the lunar lander for the, for the Oh

Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
Wow. <Laugh>. And then, oh,

Alex Lindsay (00:57:31):
That's cool. And then cool. It was so cool. And what, what happened was, is then my you know, my, my friend Fred, he is, you know, he's got the, he's talk, he's a surveyor. And so the two of them go into this discussion about Ellipsoids. And well, you know, the mo moon is normally spherical. And, and, and then and, and, and Fred goes, well, how do you handle the coordinate systems? And we're talking about, you know, there's all these coordinate system discussions, and it's much harder to land on the lo on the, on the South Pole. And, and because you have to do a long, this long el ellipsoid to stay in that orbit. And, and it was just like this incredible. But that's, so when you're here, I could do that, or I could be up here watching TV <laugh>. That's how I usually, usually look at it. One of the few. I

Leo Laporte (00:58:12):
Would, I would probably stay on the show floor a little bit, a little bit longer. Yeah. <laugh> Apple is testing an M three max chip also, according to Mark Germond you start seeing these tests as Apple builds these devices, they go on geek bench and stuff, and it's kind of a leak, really. Model code named J five 14, a MacBook Pro Highend, the central processing unit of the M three max, according to Germin, has 16 main processing cores and stand back 40 GPUs. This is according to test logs from a third party Mac app developer that was seen by Bloomberg News. There's the disclaimer is, and for, oh, I should mention 48 gigs of memory,

Jason Snell (00:59:00):
All of this. This is your MacBook Pro. This is your Yeah, with a max mean

Leo Laporte (00:59:02):
It'll be in, it'll with a max

Jason Snell (00:59:03):
In it. Yeah. It'll be in the studio A as well, but like, probably this debuts in a MacBook Pro next year 14 and 16 Refresh next

Leo Laporte (00:59:11):
Year. Yeah. Very likely next year. Not this year, right?

Jason Snell (00:59:15):
Yeah. Yeah. The M three may not even be this year, but if it is, it'll be end of the year and it'll be the base model again, right? Like, it'll be a MacBook error, but probably, I think Berman's report suggests it's probably something that's not gonna be here till early next year.

Leo Laporte (00:59:28):
Four more high performance C P U course 12 in total, and at least two additional graphic course four efficiency course. So you know, that gives us some insight into what's, what's coming. And not, not surprising. I think the real unknown is what kind of performance jump the M three will be from the M two. The M two was a incremental jump from the M one, but because we're going to a new node, I think maybe this will be a bigger jump. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:58):
Yeah. I, I, I, I, I just think it's, it's harder, it's getting harder for Apple to explain here's why you would, here's what will entice you about this new family of processors over the previous one. 'cause It's not as though, it's not like the iPhone 14 is gonna be one L one, not as one less as good as the iPhone 15. It's like, okay, but this is gonna be a rel it's not as, there's a version of the M three that's not gonna be relevant for you. If you already have an M two Pro. It's gonna be really, really hard for the, the, the messaging on this. But I, but

Alex Lindsay (01:00:26):
I think it's, it's also not just an upgrade from, you know, the previous M ones or M twos. You know, there's, you know, there's hundreds of millions of Intel max out there. And the question is, is when does the pressure point, you know, build to a point where, wow, it's time for me to move on to a new, to a new computer. Same thing with the iPhone. It's, you know, you're not looking at trying to just get people to upgrade from a year or two ago. You have all these hundreds of millions of iPhones that are five, six, seven versions deep that you have to, to market to. And I think that they, you know, as you keep on making these, these in, you know, upgrades, you keep on adding that pressure to, you know, this might be my time to, to do it. Because I think also a lot of people have learned to wait until the, like, I I, other than Mac Mini's, which I just kind of consider, like, there's just gonna be what they're gonna be. I I don't, I buy every computer the week after it was announced. Like that's, you know, like I just wait. Almost always. Unless we absolutely need something, we just wait. So those release cycles and showing that there's some in improvement is also the big push for that quarter to, to keep people moving

Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
Forward. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I But you, so I think normal consumers spread it out. That's why probably the laptops, there's not so much urgency. 'cause Normal computers, normal users aren't buying desktops so much as laptops. Right.

Alex Lindsay (01:01:41):
And I think we still keep on going back to the fact that, you know, these computers are so much faster than the last ones. I think that the getting people to upgrade from M ones and M twos, yeah. To m threes and m fours are gonna be really hard because, you know, what are you doing with that computer that makes it worth it? You know? And, and you know, I think people aspirationally wanted to move there and they saw a huge jump. And you see, you do see a huge jump from Intel to M one. But once you're in the M series that gets a lot more complicated just because there's not a lot of software. If you're not doing graphics, if you're not doing video, if you're not doing some of, you know, a hard number crunching, there's not many things that are gonna go any faster with a new machine.

Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
Yeah. I'm actually pretty darn happy with with my, I think it's an M one studio. I don't, I don't feel any urgency, but for some reason I do always buy the new laptop.

Jason Snell (01:02:27):
I dunno, <laugh>. Well, the, the things that get you aren't, and this is so true, like Alex says, now that it's not the new processor, usually the new processor's great, and it will come with you. And for maybe if you're a MacBook Pro buyer, it means more, but like the MacBook Air is their top laptop, what's gonna, you know, the new design drove it, new colors can drive it a better upgrade to the display or the webcam, reduce the size of the bezels, add a different, you know, I don't, I like it ends up being more about the gestalt of the computer and not the power, but some other collection of features that pushes you over into buying a new one. I think more likely than back in the day when it used to be like, oh, this computer's so slow, I need a faster computer. It's not really like that now. It's about like all the accoutrements that make up the, the, the product.

Alex Lindsay (01:03:12):
And, and, and I think also as much as Apple would like to get rid of every plug that we could possibly put into that computer, for me, peripherals are a big deal. Like, you know, the, the, the Mac Mini Pro is got a lot more lanes and a lot more, you know U Ss B connections. And there's a lot of us that are filling those up and they still do a good job at, at connecting everything. And so I think that that's the other thing that you look at as you start to, as, as those ratchet up. And I think that, I think that Apple could do better in that area, to be honest.

Leo Laporte (01:03:45):
Okay.

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:48):
We'll see. Yeah. Alex, I wanted to ask you something. If after reading some stuff like Nvidia spends from SIGGRAPH today, like how much pressure is Apple gonna get from a company like Nvidia that can basically bring all the graphics horsepower that a lot of professionals need? Professional, particularly for like, for AI and for vr, and also allowing people to say, well, here's take $8,000, build whatever version of a, whatever feature Rich Mac Pro you want to build that won't run Mac, but at least you'll be able to access it with Nvidia and this other ecosystem. Is that really significant for Apple?

Alex Lindsay (01:04:19):
I don't think Apple has any pressure because they can't compete with those board with those desktops. You know? So like the app, the Mac Pro is not gonna do what that Nvidia desktops are gonna do. AMD's talking, I mean, there's, there's rumors that AMD's got 96 cores coming, you know, for some of their CPUs. You know, these are big machines and, and these machines are, and, and I, and I think this is where Apple, I think did a pretty smart move in the sense of the Nu Mac Pro tops out, I think at 12 and a half thousand dollars or $13,000. They're not trying to build a $60,000 machine. Because if you start Penny, for Penny, starting to compare them with these big Nvidia the cards, the computers, the same thing with the, the A M D solutions and the, and the next thread rippers and the, and the hps.

(01:05:01):
Those are playing a different game. And, and, and the reality is that game is really small. Like it's a really small number of people. It's growing. It's a really profitable business for Nvidia. It's a profitable business for a M d, but it is a very vertical business, and it's really not Apple's. I think that's just not where Apple goes anymore. I think that the, the Mac Pro does a great job of you know, really handling 95 to 99% of the market that they're, that they're aiming at. But there's definitely, there's definitely things that I would use a PC for, you know these really heavy photogrammetry nerfs you know, those types of things are gonna be you know, really hard re a lot of big rendering. You know, those, those kinds of number crunching things are really belong. I mean, right now I think they really belong on a pc, you know, for the really, really big solutions.

(01:05:51):
Not I think that Apple is not gonna be not gonna be competitive in that area. I think that they can, they can do a, a good job for, again, 95, 90 9%, I think it's the 1% at the top. I think they've just decided, when I looked at the Mac Pro, which I think is the right way to go for Apple, is they just decided to seed all of that, all of those really heavy, all that heavy lifting to, to someone else for a market that I, I think it is too small for them to really pay attention to.

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:18):
Sure. Yeah. I was, I was, I was reading about the Grace Hopper super chip that they announced, and I'm like, just going on, not as someone who uses this as a practical way, but someone who just looks at specs and looks at like the, the, oh man, the, the RAM that they're using. The way that they architected this, it's like, wow. Another, another reason for me to be confused as to why people spend more than X thousand dollars on a Mac. 'cause It just seems like a very, like you're saying, it seems like it's a very, very esoteric world in which above a certain level of performance, it's not building one computer that is this, that this is this performant, but having a need for it. No, I don't care about this aspect. I need the fastest ram, or I need the most amount of RAM I can possibly get in here to run these models. So it's, it's just why I keep being confused about above I'm, I'm good up to about $4,000, $5,000. Once we get above that, I'm like, I have lost the ability to know who's buying a Mac Pro at this

Alex Lindsay (01:07:09):
Level. Well, well, but I think that Mac Pro, there's a lot of things. I mean, number one is it runs this, this, this operatings system called Mac, <laugh> Mac. And so, so that there's a big number of people that want a lot of power, and they, these people are going to be doing medium to high-end, not the ultra high-end, but medium to high-end graphics work. They're gonna be doing high, very high-end video work. I mean, there's nothing that you really can't do with eight, I mean, up to eight K video, and we start talking about 16 K video or something more maybe, but really up to eight K video. The, the, this is tuned for that. You know, and I think for some, you know, general scientific work, I think it's tuned for that. So I think that it, it is. And it's the same thing with Final Cut.

(01:07:47):
If you look at, at that process is when you start talking to the Abbot editors about what they want and what they, you know, what they need to have to switch over, it's so fiddly, like all these little things that nobody's no, none of the op no one's gonna use. And when you give them all those features, they're still gonna use an avid <laugh>. So, so, so the thing is, is that, so there's no, there's no upside for Apple to go into that market in the same way that I don't think there's an upside, the, the specialty that the specialty approach that NVIDIA's taking, AMD's taking that a lot of other ones are taking in these really high-end solutions. And we're seeing a lot of that here on the floor. I mean, you know, Nvidia and, and, and HP and everything else, that's a world that I just don't, I just don't, I think Apple's got a lot of engineering to do for the rest. The 95% or 99% that's, that's out there. And I just think they've, I, I think they've let that go. And I think that the, the last Mac Pro is not letting that go. It's, it was going to to 60,000. It's just not, it's you know, but now I think it's stopping at 12,000. And, and I do think that all those cards, you know, all the lanes that you have with the, with the SBCs, all of those things are, are huge advantages, you know, to so why you'd still buy 12, 12,000 machine.

Leo Laporte (01:08:54):
I think there's not too much of a threat to Apple in the content creation sphere, but the biggest growth sphere right now I in computing is ai. And Apple has no position there at all. I mean, that's what the Grace Opera Yeah, that's, those are Nvidia is making the Grace Opera is for ai. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:08):
Primarily. Yeah. The numbers are crazy. These are like $30,000 cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, these really, you know, those, it's

Leo Laporte (01:09:13):
Not for the, it's not for the average end user. And it's probably a small market, but it is a hot market, right?

Alex Lindsay (01:09:19):
It

Leo Laporte (01:09:19):
Is. But look at Nvidia stock <laugh>, but compared.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:22):
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's, it's, it's, it's a great market for Nvidia. I just think that it, you know, apple has not proven to do really, really well in really vertical markets, you know, and so, and I think that this one, this, it's also just a really hard clientele, you know, that also has a lot invested in Nvidia. You know, like that's another like, real challenge there is that Nvidia has a lot of processes that a lot of these, the software, a variety of these software tools are dependent on the R T X or they're dependent on these things. They're, they wrote to that code base. So it's not just it's not competing apples to apples. They have something different that everyone's written to already. So they're really serving that, that built up market.

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:01):
Yeah. Is it relevant to wonder about the halo effect, about how yes, this is a verified, the, the Grace Hoppers, I hit very rarefied air chipp, but perhaps another generation will see the relevant features that bubbling down into Apple's actual target users? Well,

Leo Laporte (01:10:15):
That's a good question. Maybe.

Alex Lindsay (01:10:16):
Yeah, maybe I, you know, they, they, they do in some cases because all everyone's buying these Nvidia and a M D video cards, and so it does trickle down the fact that it has, that has already got a trickle down effect that goes through that. I think in the same way that Apple isn't necessarily going to go after NVIDIA's market, I don't know if Nvidia really wants to go after Apple's market. Like, you know, consumers are, are fiddly people too, you know, in different ways, you know, and they're like, you don't understand. Why doesn't it just work? Why can't I just hit the button? You know? And, and the engineers <laugh>, I mean, the people who were doing, who were doing Bitcoin for a long time had figured out how to take their, their, their graphics card and hang it from a wire and plug everything into it so that they could, so that it could cool better.

(01:10:58):
This is not the average Apple user, you know, like <laugh>, it's not a pull piece of put piece of it out, and I'm gonna hang them all through there so I can blow fans through it in China. You know, like that's a, so, you know, so the, and, and, you know, the fact that, that the, the interesting thing here is that, and what NVIDIA's really well, and we're seeing this here at C Graph, is they are making the jump. Because, you know, there was, I was in some discussion, we were talking about how great it was that that Bitcoin had had cooled off because now we can all finally buy out graphics cards again. You know, like, you know, and ai, AI would have a really hard time chat. G P T mid Journey would all have a really hard time scaling right now, if ai, if bit, if Bitcoin was at 60,000 you know, a coin or a hundred thousand a coin all the AI we see right now may not exist. You know, like, because there, you just couldn't get the processors to do

Leo Laporte (01:11:48):
It. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's actually happening already. In general, it's very, there's already, again, shortages of these high-end platforms because of ai.

Alex Lindsay (01:11:58):
So processing, I mean, even these giant processes that are really expensive. I saw some slide this morning on one of, on one of the keynotes for NVIDIA's giant processors, and it goes, they can do a hundred images a minute,

Leo Laporte (01:12:09):
Right? Like that, like nothing.

Alex Lindsay (01:12:11):
This is super expensive. It could do a hundred images a minute. That's how that tells you how, how

Leo Laporte (01:12:15):
Big

Alex Lindsay (01:12:15):
These images are, you know, computational expensive. These, these images are. Yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:12:19):
Let's take a little break. Apple is making an investment along with other companies in a chip designer, maybe because they don't want to give up this space. We'll talk about that when we come back. Andy and Kos here from Wg b H of Boston, and I h n a t k o.com, which is any day now, <laugh>, you're gonna probably open that up and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk do the cage mask match. You're gonna have a special kind of maybe live blog it there.

Andy Ihnatko (01:12:47):
We, we've got foreign investment in place, <laugh>, we're just waiting for <laugh>. You got a buyers compliance checks, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:12:56):
Just a matter of time. And I like to tease you about it once in a while.

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:02):
Oh. I'm, I'm, I'm getting that. You're, you're enjoying this. I'm getting that clear, simple. Don't worry. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:13:08):
No. Okay. I'm sorry. I don't mean to I

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:11):
No, no, no, no. Don't take

Leo Laporte (01:13:12):
Pleasure outta your pain. I apologize.

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:14):
Again. It is, is, it is a thing that I strive to complete, <laugh>. It's, it's, it's hard. It's hard to, it's hard to complete. Like when you have act like deadlines of people who will be very, very upset if something isn't done on the day that you

Leo Laporte (01:13:26):
Promised it. No, it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. You do it at your pace. Nobody, you know, when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine ceiling, Pope Julius kept sending, when will it be done? He said, gimme a chance, man. I'm making a masterpiece up here. It's like that,

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:41):
At least, you know, at least people are still like, bugging me about it. Not like, you know, not like, oh, well, we, we've just simply accepted that we're never going to see the last book in the game of Throne series <laugh>. We,

Leo Laporte (01:13:50):
We've

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:51):
Gotten, I can take all the time you want. We know you'll never gonna write this.

Leo Laporte (01:13:54):
Ross was, no, I really am Patrick Roth. You could just give up. It's okay. We don't, we're fine. <Laugh> si. Also with us, of course, from 0 9 0 Media, but more importantly, office Hours Global, well, more importantly to us, not to him Alex Lindsay office Hours is rocking it as always. And if you wanna get color charts, six colors dot com's got 'em in every color of the rainbow.

Jason Snell (01:14:22):
I bought a lot of color ink. We didn't want those black and white charts like you see in other websites. No, we went for color. Color because it's in the name of the site. And I'm like, embracing the name of the site, is that I spent good money on that domain name <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:14:35):
Is that a tickle Me Elmo over your left shoulder there?

Jason Snell (01:14:38):
It's a, it's a giant Elmo Bobblehead, actually. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:14:42):
Yeah. That's exciting. That's like

Jason Snell (01:14:43):
Throwing, throwing a, I I haven't taken 'em out of the box yet, though.

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
What's that? On the other side of it? The Brown thing. What's that

Jason Snell (01:14:51):
Next to it? Yeah, that's the that's the Stanford ax. That's the Cal Stanford. Oh my gosh. Rivalry. It is,

Leo Laporte (01:14:57):
It's an ax. I see

Jason Snell (01:14:58):
Now. I mean, it's not the actual ax. It's a replica. <Laugh>. It's a replica. It's, I did not steal the ax. Probably

Leo Laporte (01:15:05):
You could tell so much about people.

Jason Snell (01:15:07):
It's a replica. I

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:07):
Think he, I think he's running the double bluff, frankly. <Laugh>, I think, I think some sophomores are going to be ransacking

Jason Snell (01:15:13):
Your, oh, marrow <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:15:16):
Our show today. <Laugh> brought to you by Zip Recruiter. We love ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring, you know, it is, it can be incredibly hard to attract top talent if you don't have Apple stock options to offer 'em. It's tough. And it's, you know, with the current labor market, it's harder than ever. That's why you want a partner who helps, who gets it? Ziprecruiter, it's what we use. Ziprecruiter knows how tough it is right now, but they figured out solutions for all the problems, all of them that you might be facing. If you're hiring, see for yourself, you could try it right now for free at ziprecruiter.com/mac break. How does ZipRecruiter help you tackle your recruiting challenges? Well, as an example, how do you get that top talent? Well, first of all, they're out there, right? So you want to go to ZipRecruiter and reach out to the broadest possible audience, a hundred plus job sites with one click of the house at ZipRecruiter.

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Okay, good start, right? You're casting a wide net, but still they're out there. How do you get them to apply to your listing? Well, this is the cool thing. Ziprecruiter goes through all those resumes. More than a million current resumes on file picks. People whose capabilities match your requirements and sends 'em to you. You can review 'em, you can pick a, the couple that you like, and then invite them to apply. I'll tell you what, you go right to the top of an applicant stack when you invite them. They're flattered. They're, they're pleased. They go, oh, this, I, this must be a good company. They see my value. That's another way to move ahead in the line. Also, ZipRecruiter has great little tags you could put on your listing that immediately tell people, yes, you can work from home here, or, yes, benefits, or, you know, you, you add those tags.

(01:17:00):
That is another way of, of raising your post to the top. I think ZipRecruiter is the best ZipRecruiter's pricing very. There are no surprise costs. You will know what it costs before you post. And right now you could post for free team up with a hiring partner who understands what you need. We love 'em. Ziprecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Mac break. You post now. You post now you'll probably get a great candidate within a 24 hours. We usually get it within a few hours. It's amazing. Ziprecruiter.Com/M A c b r e A k ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. Thank you ZipRecruiter, for supporting our little show here. Our little bitty Mac show here. The little one that we do and have been doing since. What are you shaking your head at John Ashley? Since 2000, when did we start this? 2005, 2006. Somebody asked me the other day, who was that guy? That was the rich guy that used, that was a bird photographer that was on, and Merlin Mann would make fun of his yacht. <Laugh>.

(01:18:22):
Those were the days. Scott Bourne. Oh, Scott Bourne. Yeah. Those are the days. In fact, I even found the, the episode, I think it was monocle, monocle, Pete's Yacht Wax was the name of the episode. <Laugh>, were you on then? Andy? Did we have were you on with that, that crew? I don't know. That could been, been Think that was predated you. Maybe that could be ba yes. Yeah, it was like, it was episode 64 or something. It was in the first year, first two years I think. I, I, I've, I've been around long enough that that was a meme that I had to learn. Yeah. <laugh> I know you were Alex 'cause this, you started this show back, back in the day. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:18:59):
Yeah. I think that we did the first, I think it was, I think that the first video version was 2006, and then Mac Break Weekly, I think came after that. So I think it might've been two. We had some what we call Mac Break Minutes that I think we did in 2005. Right. And so those were these little short,

Leo Laporte (01:19:15):
How that first one Tips one, was it Mac World Expo in in 2004? January four, right. Or 2005, I think

Alex Lindsay (01:19:22):
It was 2005. Five. It was

Leo Laporte (01:19:23):
January, 2000. I, Justine and me. Yeah. And

Alex Lindsay (01:19:27):
Yeah, no, no, Justine wasn't. I think Justine was not. That was later until the following year. And so I think she was one or two years behind that. But we were doing, we had Emery Wells and Amber MacArthur. That's right. I think we're the That's right. We're the, we're the

Leo Laporte (01:19:40):
Four. It was Amber. I remember that. And of course, Emory Wells has gone on to fame in Fortune.

Alex Lindsay (01:19:45):
He's done. Okay. You know, he's, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
He founded frame.io and is now sold it to, to Adobe. Who do you sell it to? I forget

Alex Lindsay (01:19:53):
Adobe for 1.2 million in cash. Billion

Leo Laporte (01:19:56):
B with a B. Don't you know, Emery says that's a B I'm in the Six Comma Club. No, don't forget it. <Laugh>. You never hear from him anymore. I don't,

Alex Lindsay (01:20:05):
Yeah, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (01:20:07):
Before you, before you get jealous. It was in Nichols and, and unrolled too, so,

Leo Laporte (01:20:12):
Yeah. Well, he could afford, afford the yacht and the yacht wax. So we're gonna give him the Monica Pete's yacht wax for I think all the guests of Mac Break Weekly get Monica Pete's yacht Wax, <laugh> consolation price, apple and Samsung lining up to invest in arm. It's sad. The story of Arm is almost sad in a way. Apple started arm back in the Newton days, they were looking for a risk yeah. Risk processor they could use with good, bad battery life in a portable device. They sold off their stakes some time ago. Softbank owns it now. Softbank's been trying to divest forever. First they, they tried to sell it that didn't, that didn't work. Then they're, now, they're, then they tried an I P O, I think, and now they're selling stakes to their customers. Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and did I say Nvidia? Nvidia, <laugh> and Intel, all buying stakes in arm. I don't know how big Apple's stake will be. But you know, Nvidia tried to buy it for $40 billion. So imagine, you know, it's worth, it's worth a little something. And it is in Apple's interest because Arm, they are a they architecture licensee for the arm breast.

Alex Lindsay (01:21:31):
And I think they all wanna have a seat at the table. They all want to benefit from using it. And, and any of them buy it, and it ends up being antitrust <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
So that's, I think that's the, well, that's why Nvidia couldn't, basically that's how Nvidia, basically Yeah, they get, yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:21:44):
This is based on a report in from <inaudible>. And it, it says that they're not necessarily looking to sell the entire company. They're looking to sell single digit percentages to sort of stabilize what the company's about. So, yeah, and, and you're absolutely right. This is all about, if it's, it's not about these companies trying to get together and bond together to sell, to, to save and celebrate this, it's no, they would like to e any one of them would pay for it individually. But if they don't go in together, then they, no one can own it. So

Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
When the Nvidia deal was scrapped February of last year, they paid arm more than a billion dollars in the breakup fee. So they already <laugh>, they're already kinda all in on arm. Well,

Alex Lindsay (01:22:21):
And, and I think that for any major user of Arm if everybody else goes in, you have to go in. So whatever, you know, there's not really a lot of choice. Otherwise you're gonna get, you potentially get, get left out of important decisions.

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Right. another investment from Apple, it's interesting. Ry is trying to spend a little bit of its cash holdings. They're buying servers for AI from Foxconn. What I did not know this is an Apple Insider story, is that Foxconn sells a significant percentage, 43% of all AI servers worldwide to chat open ai, the chat G p d creators to Amazon Web Services to Nvidia. I, Foxconn is obviously building these servers to somebody's spec. What does that catalog look like? <Laugh>? I want that. Yeah, let's get that catalog. I'd like to buy an AI server please. Tim Cook has said that Apple's working on AI and has been for years. And that machine learning pervades everything. It does. But of course, it doesn't have a public facing AI solution unless you count Siri, which no one <laugh>, no one would use the word intelligence in Siri in the same sentence.

Andy Ihnatko (01:23:35):
They'd rather that be less publicly <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:23:39):
According to the South China morning post, apple has ordered an unknown number of servers for the training and testing of AI services. They'll be made by Foxconn division called Foxconn Industrial Internet built in Vietnam. Foxcom already Apple's biggest supplier of servers for their data centers. And according to the South China Morning post, Foxconn accounts for 43% of the server market globally, which I had no idea. So they're, yeah, you know, they're making

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:11):
'Em that, that is interesting. That is interesting. Be because it, it kind of points to either the, the privacy that they were seeking to be able to say that we are taking this completely in-house, both for their own industrial like IP reasons, but also if they were to launch any service or any feature enhancement that relies on a server-based II AI product, they want to be able to say that No, we're not using Google Cloud. No, we're not using any other out outside. We're not outsourcing any of this. This is all stays within our purview and within, within your original privacy agreement. But it also means, I wonder how much, how much, this is just knowledge that they can't continue to grow their model without having this kind of resource versus they actually want to launch this as a real thing. Because remember that a lot of this is, this is the, this is the bakery for an AI model. Once the model is cooked, they don't, they won't necessarily need computing hardware of this scale and magnitude to have it working on either their own local servers, servers or to have this running. Even on future future Apple products and devices.

Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
We don't know how many servers or or how much it will cost. Although Pixel Budd says that their investment Apple's investment in Arm was an arm and a leg. So maybe <laugh>, maybe this is equally expensive. More ha more ways to spend the Apple dollar. You have the story, Jason, I've been watching. You know, if you look at Apple tv, if you, apple tv, apparently Lionel Mess is the second coming.

Jason Snell (01:25:37):
There's sports of it. <Laugh> coming.

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:39):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:25:39):
Holy cow. There is more Lionel mess on my Apple TV than anything else. This is their major league soccer investment. Did they have a hand in bringing messy to, where'd he go, Jersey? They,

Jason Snell (01:25:52):
They did. No, no. Miami. Miami. And they did which he likes. 'cause There's an Argentinian community there and it, it's pretty it's easier for him to get back home as well. But all the part of the deal was the league. It's not just the clubs, right? The, it's the league and Apple all reportedly make made a deal where Messi actually will get paid at least in part based on how well m l s subscriptions do. Oh, that he, he's gonna get a little piece, he's got a little piece of the upside of m l s the m l s season pass that Apple sells. And that was one of the sweeteners in the deal, just like they made the deal for Beckham, where they basically said, we'll give you an expansion team, which is the Miami team, which Beckham is a part O owner in now. So they, they're, they're motivated to sweeten the deal for messy, and now they're promoting the half out of it. And which leads us to the story you're gonna talk about, which is Apple trying to buy into American College football and, and actually sort of sweetening the deal to the point where it almost worked <laugh>, but instead it didn't

Leo Laporte (01:27:01):
Apple offered the nine remaining members of the PAC 12 conference. It, so are they gonna call it PAC nine A five year deal? It's Pac

Jason Snell (01:27:10):
Wait for it. PAC four now

Leo Laporte (01:27:12):
Oh, a five year deal with an annual base rate of $23 million per school. That seems like a good amount of money. I'm reading from Jason's article at six colors with incentives based on projected subscribers to a PAC 12 streaming product like their m l s League pass. However, yeah, <laugh>

Jason Snell (01:27:31):
Didn't,

Leo Laporte (01:27:31):
It didn't work

Jason Snell (01:27:32):
Out that way. It didn't work out. So, so they sweetened the deal, but what they wanted, and this seems to be Apple, so what can we learn from this Apple's model with sports rights? Seems to be different. Most sports rights, you literally just write a check and say, we will give you money to the N F L or whatever. They don't want to have an upside downside relationship with you. They want you to pay them. And Apple doesn't wanna play that game. So Apple, with m l Ss, there's obviously, it's a partnership. And this PAC 12 offer they made was and they sweetened the deal, but they wanted there to be upside that they were participating in with the conference. The conference would need to support this. And if the conference would successful in driving subscriptions to a season pass product, apple and a conference would benefit.

(01:28:17):
And the schools in the conference, which is so unconventional, but there were three teams in the conference that were talking about leaving to go to a conference that already had basically given them guaranteed money if they switched. And Apple sweetened the deal enough that they, that they said, okay, we'll we'll take this deal, we'll take this deal. However, there were a couple other teams in the conference who didn't love the idea of Apple basically saying, you wanna, we're not GU guaranteeing you this extra money. You're gonna have to work for it. And so they, at the last minute, basically went to the Big 10 conference and said, we'll take less money, please make us an offer. All you have to do is beat this Apple deal. And the Big 10 went to Fox the TV network and said, do you have extra, extra money for Washington and Oregon?

(01:29:03):
And they said yes. And at that point, everybody left. And all that's left in the pack for right now is Cal and Stanford and Washington State and Oregon State. That's so depressing. And the question is, so, so will they try to rebuild and bring in some new schools and sell something to Apple? Well, maybe, but it won't be for this. But in the end, from an Apple perspective, look, as a Cal person, I am devastated. 'cause This is the end of a, my entire life of being a sports fan. It's all gone now. They, it just evaporated on Friday, it's gone, it's over. This will be the last year and then whatever it is, it won't be this anymore. The thing that I grew up with. But from the Apple perspective, I will say we've learned something here, which is Apple's got all the money in the world.

(01:29:44):
We said it, Apple's got 40 billion in the bank. They can do whatever they want, but they're not willing to write the big check because they seem to believe philosophically they want partners who are going to benefit at, with them in the success of the product they're trying to build. And with m l s, they have a partner with a PAC 12. That's what they wanted. They coulda, they could've said, we'll just give you 30 million a school and walk away. And they, they refuse to do that. I think philosophically. And I think the question is, is that the future of sports rights negotiations? I wonder with all of these now direct to consumer products that are out there, streaming services, I wonder if what we just saw is the first example of, of groups with sports rights being told. I'm not gonna write you a blank check, right? Yeah. I, you need to participate in the success or failure of this. And I would, I would not be surprised if that we see this repeat itself over the next decade as the economics of sports TV work themselves out. But regardless, it, you know, apple, I think Apple basically got the ones that were sitting on the fence to come back in. And then the two that said that were solid are like, we're not actually solid. And then they were out and the whole thing was a house of cards and it collapsed. There is

Leo Laporte (01:31:01):
A temptation to say that Apple destroyed the PAC 12.

Jason Snell (01:31:06):
I mean, you could say that, but they're not a charity. Right? They could have saved the PAC 12 if they had offered more, but they didn't think it was worth more. And you know, there are a lot, there are plenty of villains here. Fox is a villain. The Big 10 is a villain. Oregon and Washington are villains. U S C is a villain 'cause they started this. But the truth is, money talks. And right now in co in college sports, the only thing that matters is football, TV, money. Apple wants to plan that game for people outside the US people who don't follow sports. American football is number one, and college football is one A behind the N F L in terms of money. And huge ratings and huge money. And

Alex Lindsay (01:31:39):
College games are the ramp to, for, to professional games, <laugh>. So if Apple's able to show, here are all the features that we could add, and these are all the things that we could make it cool and everything else, then the next time the N F L comes around with a contract, right? Apple's not going, Hey, we haven't done like, I mean, Amazon came, kind of came in from nowhere to get Thursday night football and the first year wasn't perfect <laugh>, you know, like it wasn't, you know, like it was, it needed a little work to, you know, to kind of work out some of the kinks on the streaming side. Mostly just, just on, I mean, not so much the production, but just on getting the infrastructure ready to go. So I think that, that this is you know, I think N F L doesn't wanna do too much of that either. So having a team, you know, being able to show what those features are, especially as you have the Vision Pro, you have a lot of devices, you know, you can start to show why it would make sense to do that. And I think that's part

Leo Laporte (01:32:28):
Of what, and the original

Jason Snell (01:32:29):
Deal, and it was gonna be a relatively bargain priced and West Coast conference, so it's gonna be close to home for Apple. There were a lot of things as a test for them that this would've been a good fit, but clearly they were not willing. They like I said they sweetened their deal by 2 million guaranteed per school. And that got the Arizona schools and Utah off the fence and saying, we will stay stay. And they came on Friday morning to the meeting and basically said, okay, we're here. And then everybody looked around and said, wait a second, where are Oregon and Washington <laugh>? And that was the end of the whole story. But, so they kind of closed the deal in some ways, but what they would not do is just say, forget about being our partner. We're just gonna write you all checks for 30 million a year. They were not willing to do that. And, and that's interesting, right? 'cause They could, but I don't think they want to, I don't think they like doing business that way. Also,

Leo Laporte (01:33:15):
I think you're right. I understand that the original negotiation wasn't that Apple would have all the rights. There was a, a rights package that somebody else was at E S P N probably that that a broadcaster had in conjunction with an Apple offer. And Apple might have had more, you know, interesting

Jason Snell (01:33:34):
Technological stuff. Yeah. But there was ultimately no final offer there. That one sort of fell by the wayside and a lot of Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
'Cause The traditional guy dropped out. So now Apple's

Jason Snell (01:33:42):
Saying it's a little

Leo Laporte (01:33:43):
Esoteric Apple trying to save the, the deal and saying, oh, well we could do it all, but you're gonna have to help us a little bit.

Jason Snell (01:33:50):
Well, and, and it sounds from the reports that I saw the Sports Business Journal report about this, that they, obviously, the universities are very concerned, they want high profile games on tv, right? Because those are how you recruit and how people discover your university. And if it's all locked behind a paywall or behind a streaming app, that's not as good. And so it sounds like Apple basically said, we will try to do what we did with M L S, which is license some of our games back to E S P N or something like that. But we're not giving you any guarantees about that. We're gonna have to negotiate that and see what it's like. So are these conferences that gave them pause too, for

Leo Laporte (01:34:26):
People who are listening and very confused, and I'm one of them. These are these conferences like, like say like the leagues of in, in, in, in European football, like the Premier League and it's, it's a

Jason Snell (01:34:37):
League. It's a, it's a group of universities that have the control of TV rights to their sports. And usually,

Leo Laporte (01:34:45):
And one

Jason Snell (01:34:45):
That's most is football

Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
And usually geographically nearby. True. Right. There's the S e c Yes.

Jason Snell (01:34:50):
Traditionally, although that, that has basically fallen, fallen apart in the last couple of years because everybody, there's a huge land rush right now because the conferences, they're too big. I mean, the short version is they're two big conferences, the S e C and the Big 10. And they are basically powered by Fox and E S P N. And they are headed for, in the 2030s, the creation of essentially two semi-pro conferences that take all the money and will, and they will pick out all of the schools that don't really matter. And they'll be left with like 32 schools that, and you'll say to yourself, well, what does this has to do with school? And the answer is nothing other than that. Some of that money goes back to those athletic departments to fund other sports. But it's a, it's a huge business that's worth a lot of money.

(01:35:34):
And so all the kind of traditions are breaking apart. And you end up with university presidents who on one level are very stuffy academic types, but have somebody in their athletic department basically saying, look, this is, we can't turn down 30 or 40 or $50 million a year. Can you imagine what that will do? Ironically, most of that money will just go back into the football team and not to the students or the even the other programs. I mean, the, the, the, the big sports tragedy here is that so much of the US Olympic team and many other countries, Olympic teams actually come out of the Cal and Stanford programs that have full Olympic programs. They're the most successful college athletic programs for non-revenue sports. And where did that revenue come from? A conference that no longer exists. So that's not gonna be good in the long run for America's Olympic sports, but it doesn't matter. 'cause Again, football is t is the TV money and the money talks Joe Re but Apple tried to play in that game and didn't, and didn't make it.

Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
Joe Reed's headline in the AP kind of says it, PAC Twelve's downfall came after it could not adjust to changing media landscape. Yeah. They also, that's taking kind of the apple point of view.

Jason Snell (01:36:42):
Yeah. They also took, well, no, the, the other part of it's, they turned down an offer for me, s p n last year, and they anticipated a better offer. And we all know what happened, which is Netflix had that bad quarter, everybody freaked out. It suddenly became a place streaming no longer was a place where you invested money instead you were trying to save money. And that put a chilling effect over the entire sort of TV industry. And so they turned down E S P N and E S P N did not come back to them essentially, or came back to them for almost nothing. So they made a, they made a huge miscalculation. If they had known then what we know now, they wouldn't have done it, obviously. But, but I, I, I think there's truth in the fact that pure streaming sports rights are gonna be terrifying for, for for leagues and conferences. And everybody's watching what m l s is doing with Apple. Right. Because that is the m l s just took the plunge and they are the, they're gonna, they're gonna show everybody what the issues are with taking your product and putting it on a streaming service. And

Alex Lindsay (01:37:41):
They had, and they had the, the least to lose and the most to gain <laugh>. Yes. Like they're, they're, you know, so, so there's a lot of upside for M L Ss and very little do downside. Yeah. They

Jason Snell (01:37:49):
Seem real happy. <Laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (01:37:51):
Well, I think they're, they're doing okay.

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
M l s does cover production costs. So this is, this is the new, this is where Apple was emboldened by the New Deal. So Apple did a deal with m l s with escalators based on subscriptions. M L Ss covers most of the production costs. They tried to do, they tried to do the same thing with college football and it, and it didn't work out. They, and

Jason Snell (01:38:15):
Although PAC 12 has their own production system too, all the leagues do though. That's the, we may, the future of, of these sports leagues may end up being a streamer.

Leo Laporte (01:38:22):
They just do their own thing. Buys the

Jason Snell (01:38:23):
Rights. Yeah. And say N F L you, you produced the games for us and that's it. And the N F L does it instead of CCB S or N B C

Alex Lindsay (01:38:31):
Pac 12 had one of a state-of-the-art, like when we say they have, you know, they were, they're coverage, especially for the non-revenue generating sports. They had to get those, the costs down. And so PAC 12 has you know, they were, they used to have a, a downtown facility in San Francisco, and all of those schools would send the raw cameras back. So they didn't even have, you know, they didn't have all the production there. They would just, they had a little, these little trucks that were designed for it take out, you throw out six key six cameras on Triax, you send them all back over internet too. They all come back. Sometimes the the announcers were there, sometimes they were in San Francisco, sometimes they were at home. They're doing all the play, you know, replays and everything else outta San Francisco. And it was very, very efficient. You know, it was really, I was surprised when I saw that things were coming apart, but it was, but those things don't, what they became efficient at is not what makes money.

Leo Laporte (01:39:19):
It's interesting to watch what they were required to do, how Liberty runs F one motor sports. Because Liberty is a, is a broadcaster, right? It's, it's John Malone's company. And so it's really interesting to watch. I was just watching the race a couple of weeks ago and the, and the announcers we're in England and, and they're <laugh> while the race is going on in spa in Belgium.

Alex Lindsay (01:39:41):
Oh. It's, it is it's, it's

Leo Laporte (01:39:42):
Fascinating how that the, the

Alex Lindsay (01:39:44):
Back, the back hall for F one is just

Leo Laporte (01:39:48):
Insane. And what F one has done that's smart in America, because they didn't have big broadcast deals in America. They've got their own streaming. That's far superior. I can, I can watch so much more in so many different ways than I can do on E S P N that, but they, I guess we're willing to burn A E S P N by doing that because s ESPN can't be happy. Although the numbers are going

Alex Lindsay (01:40:08):
Up, up, they own up, they own that entire pipeline. And it's just a really, really, and it's, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
Yeah. I subscribe to F one. I used to watch ESPN I f one TV 'cause I could see every driver's point of view. I can hear the driver's radio. I mean, it's, it's a very different, it's, it's exactly what you were talking about, Alex, when we were looking at M L Ss. All the technological things you can do now are remarkable.

Alex Lindsay (01:40:30):
Yeah. The, it'd be really hard to get broadcasters. There's a handful of places where you see kind of unlimited money being spent on figuring this out. Not unlimited, but very close to it. F one's one of them. N F L sometimes the NFL's working on things for years before, before you see it. Like those, the pylon cameras that you see all the time now, they were, they were sitting there, they were like, oh, that isn't good enough. Or we're tearing or something else is going on for years. Really trying to figure that out. Yeah. And so, and the, I mean, if you look at the, the project, you know, the, the how, the just the first down lines that, that pop up and all the data that's sitting looks like it's sitting on the field. If you look at any replays of like, old games only 10 years ago is, it was kind of a mess. You know, like it was just, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't very good. And now they're doing them with like moving cameras. It used to be, it was all these cameras, only a certain number of cameras were able to do that. And so, but, but that's the N F L doing that, that's not the broadcasters, right? Like the N F L is is investing that money and you need people to be that.

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
I think that, I think you're right. I think Jason's right, that's the future is that these companies, these these sports leagues are gonna produce their own video and, and sell rights to a streamer, but they're gonna be, so it looked like the college presidents or the negotiators were just a little chicken <laugh>. Yeah. And this what AP says, a person familiar with the Apple deal told AP the guaranteed yearly payouts were 23 to 25 million per school. And then there were escalators based on subscribers, as you mentioned, two and a half million subscribers. The payout would go to 30 million, which is pretty close to what the big 12 payouts are. If they reached more 3.7 million would jump to 50 million per school, which is very close to the S E C and the Big 10. Yeah. It would put these PAC 12 teams in the same arena as the biggest college football teams. Was that an unreasonable number? 3.7 million? Maybe they thought they I

Jason Snell (01:42:21):
Don't, so No, I, but I think the, I think the university, look, university presidents are so weird, and I think they're super risk averse. They're not immediate negotiators. I think this was probably a pretty great deal. Also, there's a larger issue in the end. Apple did close the deal. I mean, apple closed the deal with the ones that were doubting. And the reason that it all fell apart is an extraneous reason, which is Oregon and Washington are looking at the big picture of where college football is going, and they want to be on the bus that gets them to survival into the 2030s. And the, that N F L two essentially that the college conferences are making. And the way you get on that bus, the big 10 is the bus. Right? The PAC 12, even if it's survived another five years, is not the direct line to ultimate, you know, super college football money.

(01:43:09):
And I think that was the reason that they fell off. So in the end, I think that this is, they were skeptical of Apple not giving them guaranteed money. But I think it's an excuse. I think the truth is Apple sweetened the deal enough that they got everybody else to sign on, but the two biggest names realized they could cut themselves a be a better side deal. And you know what, if I were them, I probably would've done the same. But that was the net result is, is that apple sort of gets blamed. But I don't think Apple, I think Apple came through with the, the people that were the most skeptical, which was the Arizona schools in Utah. They, they were there on Friday morning ready to vote for it.

Leo Laporte (01:43:43):
Yeah. The the other issue is one that Apple can't solve by itself, which is linear tv, broadcast television. Yeah. And a lot of the presidents, a lot of the schools said it's important to our athletes it's important for our be on tv. That they're on TV. That if they're not on tv, they're not gonna have a national exposure. They may not get the N F L contracts. Right. And Apple could not offer

Jason Snell (01:44:05):
That Apple insist. Apple didn't insist on an exclusive deal. But what Apple, because this all happened so quickly, I think Apple said, we will try to sell games to a partner on broadcast, but we can't guarantee it. And that was not in the deal. Right? They didn't say, oh, we've got E s PN lined up. They're gonna do all these games on Saturday nights. It's gonna be great winner. They did not do that. And and so, I mean, I, 'cause I do I agree. I think you have to have both. I think the future of sports on TV is a combination of big marquee matchups that can go out to huge audiences and generate lots of commercial revenue and then niche stuff that's on a streamer. I think you gotta be able to do both.

Leo Laporte (01:44:48):
Everybody wants to watch Jason Snell run on the field and steal the X. It's just the way it is. <Laugh> now we want so fact, Fred,

Jason Snell (01:44:54):
I'm gonna hide in my osci costume, the mascot, and then run onto, onto the field and steal

Leo Laporte (01:45:00):
X pop out. Yes. E s PN and Fox, apparently, according to the ap, weren't willing to pay what PAC 12 was looking for. So they weren't getting the linear deals they wanted. Apple was offering, I think, a fair deal and you can't blame Apple for, you know, not paying more. But it just that's right. It's greed. I think

Alex Lindsay (01:45:17):
Apple

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
Wanted to show and all the other things just, it fell apart.

Alex Lindsay (01:45:20):
And I also think that Apple wanted to show that that model works. That's a great model for them. Yeah. To prove that it works. Like, hey, you know, you have to work at it a little bit. We need some help on promotion. And by the way, there is a huge upside.

Leo Laporte (01:45:30):
It was only a ten two year deal. It wasn't the 10 year deal that they made with M L Ss. They were, they said you could walk away after two years.

Jason Snell (01:45:36):
Right. It was a five year deal with an out after two if they didn't want to do that. So there

Leo Laporte (01:45:40):
Wasn't even a big commitment.

Alex Lindsay (01:45:42):
Well, the thing for Apple though, is that's a, that's a pretty sweet deal. You get a whole bunch of people to subscribe and now you got a whole bunch of people in the, in the, in the mix. And you know that that helped. There's a lot of tangential stuff so when they leave, they go find something else. But Apple keeps, you know, maybe not subscribers into that specific vertical, but they've now brought, potentially brought more people into the ecosystem.

Leo Laporte (01:45:59):
It's really interesting to see how streaming and Apple in particular has changed what we consider TV <laugh>. It's really a very different deal these days.

Alex Lindsay (01:46:09):
It's really gonna be interesting to see as we watch the strike. You know, I'm here in LA and so everyone talks about the strike. Yeah. or the strikes. And the, the issue is, is that, you know, apple and Amazon are playing a different game than everybody else. Everybody else is trying to figure out how they make money with this. And Apple and Amazon are, there's a lot of ways they make money at it, you know, and so, and it's, it's gonna be really interesting to see specifically how those two compete in these markets. Because, you know, Amazon got a little bit of the N F L, Apple's got m l s and is obviously trying to get more, but they can play that game. And it's not clear that the other streamers can afford, you know, that rich of a of a game.

Andy Ihnatko (01:46:44):
Hmm. Yeah. It's interesting when you compare it to just, just quickly, when you look at what we've been talking about for weeks and weeks and weeks about about like Goldman Sachs and <laugh> and, and other makers where they did a deal with Apple in which Apple gets to get all most of the benefits and they negotiated away most of the risks. And it's interesting to see them how the, how Apple has to negotiate when no actual, you can't dictate to us exactly how we're going to deliver your, the service. You're gonna convince us that you're a good partner for us, and you're gonna do it in a very, very demonstrative way.

Leo Laporte (01:47:16):
I don't know if you saw the Tetris movie on apple tv. It was quite a good movie. Turns out maybe it's provenance wasn't so good. Dan Ackerman, who's editor-in-chief of Gizmoto, wrote the book in 2016 called The Tetris Effect, the Game That Hypnotized the World. He is now suing Apple, the Tetris company and others saying, you adapted my book without paying me. He said he sent his book to the Tetris company in 2016. He alleges they copied it for the movie and threatened to sue him if he pursued his own film or television spinoffs. Ackerman is asking the court for 6% of the film's $80 million production budget. And it sounds like he's got a pretty good case. We'll see, let's see what happens. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:02):
I did, I did read the book and I did, I kind of assumed that they licensed it. Yeah. Or at least hired him on for some reason, because there are scenes

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
Really was there are scenes that are specifically from the book.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:11):
Yeah. And there, and there's, and the, the, the entire approach was the reason why that book was so good was because it re it didn't just say, Hey, nostalgia nerds remembered Tetris. Here's the wacky story. No. It's like, we're gonna, I'm gonna write a, a Cold War thriller Yes. That just happens to center around Tetris. And that, that's, and there's a, there's a reason why like when when Sweeney Todd got adapted as a, as musical by Sondheim, like the, the central conceit was inspired by a stage production that came out three years ago. And it was important enough to say, yeah, we're gonna have, even though like, this is really the only thing we're taking from this, we are gonna have to license this or else we're gonna be in big trouble. So yeah, that <laugh>, that's, that's pretty weird. All.

(01:48:55):
but another thing I noticed is that remember that in streaming, if, if this had been released as a real movie, there would be like box office numbers. So they could say, Hey, this movie generated X dollars for the box office income. We want a percentage of that income. But with streaming, because they don't say what the audience numbers are, they can't possibly detail like how much money they made. The only metric they can use to say, here's how much, here's how much this mu this here's how much the value of your theft has to, has to contribute. It has to be, well, we know that you spent this much money on us, we're gonna ask for a percentage of your actual production budget. So you can't get out of it that way.

Leo Laporte (01:49:30):
Yeah. That's a smart thing to do. And I, I have to think he's gonna <laugh> this is a pretty strong case there.

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:36):
There's gonna be a lunch <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:38):
Yeah. Good luck, Dan. I hope you do well. Finally Google has announced a new way to write apps for the iPhone and Android and everything else. Project I D X an experiment to improve full stack multi-platform app development says Google launched August 8th, and it allows you to do cross platform. In fact, the browser is actually the host of the I D E, which is really interesting. And they're offering ai. So it'll, it'll write some of the code for you.

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:13):
Yeah. This is, this is a really interesting development because one of the things that we've talked about for a long, long time is when will you be able to build and deploy apps directly from the iPad? Because the iPad seems to be muscular enough now that you can actually do that. Why can't we use this as a development environment? So this is, right now, this, the platform is designed for building a for building web-based apps. But they are saying that the future direction of this is to build an emulate, build an emulators for iOS, build an emulators for Android, and essentially be able to use this, this cloud-based environment. Meaning anything with a web browser will be able to run, be able to run it to create to create binary re runable for basically any platform. So you build it once, you don't even have to build it locally.

(01:50:56):
And now you can deploy this on multiple platforms. It won't be built on it, it won't be like the Xcode environment by any means. And there's a, I'm certainly willing to wonder how much of the <laugh>, how can you, can you write an equivalent app in Xcode versus an equivalent app in this thing? But when it comes to simple apps or service app writing at one place, not having to have your entire team have Mac like Mac Pro grade hardware, and be able to contribute to this code base generate with AI and basically build this one thing that could be deployed anywhere. That's super interesting. Yeah. Particularly for students, I

Leo Laporte (01:51:32):
Think works in Python, go uses Angular next Jss flutter. So it, you know, it is pretty agnostic as to the tools you use. Yeah. Very, very interesting. It uses the coded AI to generate code idx. Do dev Google has just launched that. Does it cost money?

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:53):
They, I don't, I you have to sign up for it right now, so it's not, that's gonna be, I think that's a future plan. They just announced this today, so I haven't read in depth about it. But I do know that it's invite only right now. I do believe that in the future, they're trying to use this to promote their own, like, ad deployment platform. So I'm sure that it's a way to tie that in. Also, they're making sure that they're saying that, yes, we have ai, but please don't use any of the AI as a cut and paste sort of solution. This is just <laugh>. Don't, don't trust any of the code that this platform gives you.

Jason Snell (01:52:21):
But yeah, Andy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna save you a week's worth of social media mentions and just point out you can use playgrounds on the iPad to submit apps to the app store there of limited capability, but there is a path there. It's just not X code. So,

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:33):
Good, good catch. I don't,

Leo Laporte (01:52:34):
Probably similar, I don't

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:35):
Regard playgrounds as Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:52:37):
Yeah. Yeah. very interesting. I, I must apply to the wait list 'cause I'd love to play with it. Yeah. would these be PWAs web apps or on the iPhone? Or would they be, you'd, you'd open your browser and, and run them? How, it sounds like it's browser based. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:52):
It sounds like the, it sounds like the first, the, the first release of this is to design pwa, basically anything that will run inside a web browser with the added buff that if you're running it on an iPhone web browser, it will look like an iPhone app or will look like an Android app. But they're specific, they're explicitly saying that the end game for this sooner rather than later, is to actually generate application pack packages that can be sub submitted to the various app stores.

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
Very interesting. Thank you for, I'm glad you found that. Thank you for sharing that with us, Sandy. And I'll be

Alex Lindsay (01:53:24):
Following, it'd be interesting to see like if it, if it's good enough, you know, one of the things that's interesting about that is that is the p W A enough, you know, for that, you know, 'cause then you're not using, going through the apps to stored

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:37):
Right. Tools.

Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
Yeah. And Apple's kind of got an incentive to support that. 'cause Then they can go, your Honor, <laugh>, we got p w you're

Alex Lindsay (01:53:46):
If it's good enough, but not too good. Look, if everything's too good, then, then you have everybody putting all's

Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
Doing all slow to support it. But at the same time, you know, Google does, Microsoft does and Apple does have some support for service workers and things in Safari. I would love to see Apple fully support p w a and they're, and the only reason they would do that is because then they could say to the EU and others, Hey, no, you know, you can always do that. That's what Steve Jobs said in the beginning. You don't need an app store, just put a website out.

Alex Lindsay (01:54:15):
Well, and oftentimes Google is given is, is is really good at playing the foil. I mean, apple would be in much, much, much deeper water <laugh> and much, much hotter water if, if Android didn't exist. Yeah. I mean, this would be a, a, a disaster for them. That's right. Yeah. you know, it's, you know, so it's, Google's done a a lot of good for Apple.

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:31):
Yeah. I've, I've always, I've always thought that that's one of those things that Apple says oftentimes that would, that could bite them in the butt. Which is like, now when they said, like, their defense says, well, if you don't, if you don't like our app store rules, just write it as a, write it as a website. We don't, we're not gonna limit like a, a, a web-based app. I think based on the idea that, well, of course, a web, something that's that's running inside a web container, we'll never be as sophisticated and powerful and as useful as something that's written with our own co-development tools. But as we've seen, like in 2023, oftentimes you kind of have to ask yourself, given that this app, even if it were a an iOS app, would require an active connection to the internet. Why are we bothering going through Apple at all?

(01:55:10):
Why don't we just have, why don't we write our Kindle app so that it is in fact a web app? It it can store things directly on the device. We'll be able to allow people to make purchases through the site <laugh> and install them without having to leave. We won't have to pay a dime to anybody. Facebook could say, well, actually, if we did it, if we did this as a, as a web app, again, it would look people as soon as people hit the app, they could say, oh, by the way, put an icon for this right on your desktop and use it just like any other, other app. And all of a sudden, like, <laugh> Apple is not quite so is not getting all the, all the, all the jazz they're getting from having these, these native apps. It's there.

(01:55:45):
I think the benefit is that I, I think people, I think these developers, they do want a lower level access to all the sensors and lower level access to everything that's going on, on the device. But there could be a day when there, there, I, I do write the apps for myself on occasion. And most of the apps that I write could be simply written as web apps without having to like put something provision provision on my iPad or anything like that. 'cause They are, I, I'm not writing a, the ne the next greatest word processor. I'm writing a gid a gadget so that every time that there's a cough or a pause or something in a podcast recording, I can touch a button and it's automatically creating like a, an edit log for me that, that's not really sophisticated.

Leo Laporte (01:56:25):
And if you are thinking of switching to Android, my flip phone from Samsung comes tomorrow. I'm gonna do an unboxing on twig for the Galaxy Flip five. Google has now published an ad to <laugh> to reassure you. It's all good, man. What if I'm worried about

Speaker 7 (01:56:44):
Switching phones, keeping my data, if I'm worried about making a switch, will I still be able to access the cloud?

Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
And just to make sure that they're agnostic. Yes.

Speaker 7 (01:56:58):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:56:58):
Behind. They show some other companies that's coming from the video. Yeah. Oh,

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:02):
Because I say those, those, those alerts are coming from the video.

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
Oh, yeah. By the way. Yeah. That's not you. That's, that's me. It's not

Speaker 7 (01:57:08):
You. It's all good with Google on Android.

Leo Laporte (01:57:09):
It's all good with Google on Android, even if you have a Samsung flip phone. So, all right. I'm, I'm reassured <laugh>.

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:17):
So there's, there's a, there's a set of three or four of these. I'm also, I'm also wondering how much of this was o oftentimes when a company like Apple or, or Google makes deals with device manufacturers, is that, oh, by the way, and we will also as part of this contract commit X dollars to promoting, promoting this issue, promoting doing something that will help you to sell more of your devices, even though it's not ours. So I'm, I'm sure that there was some sort of collusion saying, oh, by the way, for as they're talking to Samsung, we will make sure that we're spending money to make sure that Apple people know that yes, you can make a lateral move like that without like having to torch your entire social media profile all your contacts, all your calendars, all your photos.

Leo Laporte (01:57:57):
Yeah. Let's take a timeout. Get ready, gentlemen and ladies, no, there's no ladies here. Your picks of the week coming up in just a second. I would like to put in a little bit of a plug for our Club Twit. Maybe you watch our shows and you're tired of advertising. Maybe you would like to see us develop new shows. Maybe you'd just like to get a little bit of Aunt Pruitt's time critiquing your latest photography. That's all part of Club Twit. We announced Club Twit two years ago ago. Happy to say 8,000 of you who have joined. Thank you. $7 a month. It's very affordable. There's a a year plan, $84. There's a family plan. There's corporate plans. You get ad free versions of everything we do. You get special content we only offer in the club, including shows like the Untitled Linux Show, hands-on Macintosh with Micah Sargent Hands on Windows with Paul Ott.

(01:58:55):
We have the Gizz Fizz with Dick d Bartolo. We just launched Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson. Brought that back thanks to club members who subsidized that. Some of those shows will become part of the twit family of public shows at some point as this week in Space did, if enough interest is shown. But what's the beauty of having the club is that we can try this kind of stuff. It helps us keep the lights on. The money does not go into my pocket. I can assure you, <laugh>, it goes to support twit twit TV slash club twit. Please <laugh> become a twit <laugh>

(01:59:35):
by joining and thank you in advance. We really appreciate it. I would I would love to have every one of you be a member of the club. There's a lot of great stuff going on in there. Lemme just see Ant is always adding new events. Oh, we got a photo walk coming up at the end of the month. I'll be at that Stacey's book club. Also her new book is the book we're talking about is, and Lucky's translation. State that fireside chat with Daniel Suarez and Hugh Howie. That'll be something. And again, these are club only. We'll probably put it on the stream so you could watch it live. But if you wanna watch it after the fact, September 7th, 2:00 PM Pacific you'll, you'll be wanting to join the club. Blue Maresca, our host of this week in Enterprise Tech, is doing an Ask Me Anything, another fireside chat coming up with our AI guy Anthony Nielsen. He's our, our creative. And he is incredible. Just some of the many things going on. It's like a country club on the internet. <Laugh>, you provide the swimsuit and towel twit tv slash club twit. Thanks in advance. Alright, let's get start the pick of the week off with Jason Snell, Mr. Six Colors.

Jason Snell (02:00:46):
Well, I had to do a bunch of transcriptions on the road last week for this Apple Analyst call. And I have a whole bunch of things that I built up to. I downloaded things from GitHub that did the AI OpenAI Whisper model, and I wrote a shortcut and all of that. I'm on the road with my laptop and I'm like, oh God, can I get it all over here? Can I translate it? And the answer was no. I, I just bought a piece of software because there are two Mac utilities that actually have integrated the Whisper c plus plus framework thing that is great that you can download for free. If you pay a little more money, you don't have to use the command line. And then they'll let you export to whatever format you want. So there are two, the one that I have used is Mac Whisper.

(02:01:27):
And then the other one is called i o. They're ICO's in the Mac App Store. And it's actually in the iOS app store as well. Mac Whisperer is at Gumroad. And you can get, both of these basically are using the same open AI whisper model. It's very high quality. You can reduce the quality for speed. The medium quality is still very, very good. But the high quality is kind of mind blowing. And the medium quality Yeah. Is good enough as well. So if you ever are in a position where you need to transcribe some audio, if you're comfortable doing the GitHub and command line thing, go ahead. By all means do that. You can do it and it's free, but you might wanna pay a little tiny bit of money to go the extra mile. 'cause I know I, I, I recommended Whisper as a model last year. I, this year, I'm saying, well, you may not want all of that trouble. You don't need to. Somebody, in fact, more than one, somebody have written a nice app shell around all of that. So all you have to do is pick an audio file, press the button, and it'll generate a, a very good transcript. And this technology's only gonna get better. But I used to type the Apple Analyst call, which is an hour long. Oy by hand. Yeah, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
So did Micah. We don't, Mike used to have to do that. I think Serenity used to have to do it too. Serenity

Jason Snell (02:02:45):
And I, yeah, serenity and I, in fact, our big innovation was we had a shared Google Doc and we would time shift. So, so I'd be doing the first 15 minutes while she was doing the next 15 minutes, and then I would jump to 30 and she jumped to 45 and we would kind of interleave it. But all that's out the window. I mean, and it's been, I've been using AI transcription for a while now, but this Whisper model is so good. It is the best I've seen. And so you can't edit the transcript in these apps. You just export the text and then you can edit it somewhere else. I think the ultimate is gonna be when you get a text editor that's got the transcript in it, and you can, there are web apps that do this now, but they don't do it with, with Whisper. So I want that one to come together and have the great model and let me sort of click anywhere and hear the audio that underlies it, that's, that's coming if it isn't already been added to some of these other web services. But this keeps it all on your Mac. Nothing leaves your Mac. And so you can just do it anywhere. Even if you're traveling somewhere on the road and don't even have a good internet connection, this will work.

Leo Laporte (02:03:43):
Do you have one you prefer?

Jason Snell (02:03:45):
Mac Whisper. Okay. Is the one that I use. Ico, I just discovered, I had a friend who uses it. It, it seems to only have the large model, right. Which is the way they put that is they prioritize quality over speed, which is fair enough. It, the large model is very good. The media model though, is so close that if you, if if time is slightly of the essence, the media model and me whisper lets you choose any of the models.

Leo Laporte (02:04:09):
So interesting. All right. And that's 20 Euros for the base single license Mac Whisper program.

Jason Snell (02:04:16):
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's free for the basic super simple model. Yeah. And then you pay for the access to the higher quality model.

Leo Laporte (02:04:24):
We pay a lot for transcriptions for our shows. And, you know, we signed the deal right before Mac Whisper Whisper AI came out. Yeah. The, and it was like, the challenge

Jason Snell (02:04:32):
Is the, the big challenge with these models is speaker detection. There. I have yet to see a good thing that unites speaker detection with this transcription. 'cause That's what you want, is you want it to say, Leo said this, then Andy said that. And those, that's the next frontier. I I imagine by this time next year, they will have that solved. And then I won't have to say, this is Tim. This is Luca. Yeah, this is Tim. I won't have to do that anymore. Does it

Leo Laporte (02:04:55):
Say Speaker one, speaker two, so that you could do a global search and replacement?

Jason Snell (02:04:59):
No Whisper. Whisper doesn't do that. And there are some hacks where people like run it through two different things, a speaker detector and whisper, and then unify the time code. And like, they're getting there. It's almost there, but it's not quite,

Leo Laporte (02:05:10):
I'm sure it'll be there any, any day now. And that sounds like a simple thing to add. Says Leo, who knows nothing about how hard this would be to do good. Pick Mac Whisper or I Eko A I K O. You take your pick. Speaking of ai, I gotta, I gotta give a little credit to Anthony Nielsen, I mentioned he's our AI guru. And I think you might be interested in this in Alex. I know you're all over Mid Journey. Did you know there's a new thing called Full Journey? I did not. Also a Discord group. I'll put the links in the, in the show notes. It generates music, it generates speech and a variety of people's voices. Sound effects. Yeah, of course it does. Image gen as well. It's a, I guess an extension of of mid Journey. It's called Full Journey Here is a deep fake lings.

Speaker 8 (02:06:07):
Your lives, as you have known them, are over. Resistance is futile.

Jason Snell (02:06:11):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:13):
It does have, it looks like a watermark on these, but still I know you're a big fan of Mid Journey, so Anthony just, yeah, I'm just told me about this, this, I, I'm just watching where this goes. Yeah, it's very fascinating.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:25):
Yeah, I'll definitely check it out. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:06:27):
Yeah, full journey on on the Discord. I'll put a link in the show notes. Your pick, Mr. Alex. Yeah, it looks really interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:37):
Well, so I'm here in LA and I realize that there's a, you know, a bit of a, there's a, a store I like to go to almost every time in la. And I thought, oh, this would be, I was just there over the weekend. And if you're in la film Tools is the geekiest place that you can find about filmmaking. You know, and, and I just so much fun pointed and I went in again with my friend who had never seen any, anything like film tools. And we and I we're just walking around. I was like, well, this is what this does. And there's, you, you can believe how many little weird things you can use to attach to a car or to a thing. And these are the pro tools that you see in the movies. Nice. you know, this is just a place like where you, when you don't, when you're go like, oh, I need some, you know, little

Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Thing I gaffer's tape or some C 38. I'm

Alex Lindsay (02:07:19):
Like, c there's a whole, there's a whole wall of gaffer's tape <laugh>. There's, there's, there's the different thicknesses and different witts and different, all these things. Well, the entire, the entire wall of gaffers tape. So yeah, you're in the right place, <laugh>. And and there's like a whole section just for weird audio tools. And there's cameras in the back. And, and then you've got some lights and you've got, you've got a whole section for Pelican cases. And, and and they, and they have all this stuff. And it's just one of those places that I just, when, especially when I'm in Burbank, I was in Burbank for this this event. And so I was only about a mile away. And so I spent about an hour in there wandering around, spending too much money. And and just, you know, finding little bits and bobs of things that I need to add to my camera for the shoot that we're doing. You're in Mecca

Leo Laporte (02:08:01):
For filmmaking. I mean, this is the kind It it's a company town.

Alex Lindsay (02:08:06):
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a really great little it's, it's, it's a great space. And so it's not, there's other places that do it, and I definitely go to different you know, this kind of thing in most major cities is somewhere, but film Tools is still my favorite. And so if you're in LA it's just, even if you don't do filmmaking, it's worth just looking at all the crazy stuff that is built just to get your camera into just the right place. It's really fun.

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
Very cool. Film tools.com. But go to la go to go to Burbank and, and do it. That's where you get your, there's, there's literally Sticky Joe's stuff. <Laugh>, Joe's sticky stuff. There's

Alex Lindsay (02:08:43):
Literally a section just, just for the suction cups you use to attach your, your camera to Cars. <Laugh>. There's like a little whole section and all these different ones. There's some with pumps and some without pumps, and some with long things. And there's a little rigging that goes with it. It's, it's pretty fun.

Leo Laporte (02:08:58):
Oh, I love it. And a lot of this is on the website, so you can go right to the suction cup

Alex Lindsay (02:09:03):
Section. I do buy a lot of stuff on the website from them. It's just fun. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:09:06):
Yeah. You wanna see it on my person? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:09:09):
It's great. It it is great. There's all your, those are all there. And

Leo Laporte (02:09:14):
I want a Decan Fat Gecko dual suction cup mount. You got one of them. I got <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (02:09:19):
I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, those suction cups, when they're on, they are part of your car. Like they, you know, they're, well, we needed,

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
We needed those when we put my hero pro on my Mustang. And it fell off and the truck immediately behind me ran over it and Jerry came to me. I had came to me with the pieces and said, I'm sorry, <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (02:09:40):
I had, I had a, I did the same thing with a theta. I put it on the front right in the middle, it getting like a 360 gonna me driving. And the, the suction cup handled it just fine. But the, but it turns out the theta can only go about 55 miles an hour, <laugh> before the quarter 20 on the bottom fails and it bounces off your windshield. And then the the big tanker truck behind it crushes it. The

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
Giveaway was

Alex Lindsay (02:10:01):
Happened like, you know, two seconds.

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
It started going like this on the <laugh> on the front of the car. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:05):
And there was, it was weird. It was wobbling a little bit. And I thought to myself, I can stabilize that. That's okay. I can stabilize that a little fin. It goes,

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:13):
Aren't you? Go see if you can lock it down, <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:17):
So the, the moral is, is that you have to, you have to put the theta as a, as a fin, not a sale. Like that's when you, wherever you're going. Good to know. Fin good

Leo Laporte (02:10:24):
On sale to feel. Finn not a sale. Fem tools have fun. Andy and Ko Pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:30):
I'm really excited about this one. A few weeks ago I talked about how like I'm Evernote is not necessarily is not going away. I don't want people, some people on Twitter thought that I was, I was saying that, oh, well, because Twitter's been bought by a Twitter. Sorry, Evernote's been bought by bought out by a new company. They're moving the entire companies operations to Europe where they, where the new buyers, Ben? I'm not, yeah. Yes. It's, it's not, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're going out of, they're going outta business. But it was a good excuse for me to say, well, what thing, what feature of Evernote would I absolutely be despondent over if I didn't have it anymore? Either because they did go outta business, or they started charging so much money they can't afford it. And it's, so much of my work is saving webpages so that I have them offline.

(02:11:12):
I can take them with me when I when I travel. And also so that in case a post gets taken down, I will still have the original. And that was what I was using Evernote for. So I've been looking for a replacement for that, that wouldn't require Evernote specifically. And I finally found the one that is, oh my goodness, so much better at this job. It's called Single File. It's free. It's a plugin for pretty much any, any web browser you can imagine. It's available on GitHub. And at its very, very surface, it does exactly the simple thing. It is a plugin that appears in your, in your address bar. You click on it and then it will save ev all the content of the, the webpage that you're, you're you're looking at. And save it as a file.

(02:11:51):
And it does the thing that I was really most looking for. It's not a, it's it's not a proprietary Apple format. That was the problem of saving things from from Safari. 'cause I'd have to switch to Safari. It's not a format used by Chrome, which safari browsers don't support, which would mean that I couldn't use this in Safari it's saved as H T M L and meaning and, and saved as one simple single H tmm l file. Even all the images are com are converted to Base 64. So they're actually embedded inside the H T M L file. So it's just one H T M L file. Any, any browser made within the past, like 10 years or whatever, should be able to open this and display this on any sort of device. And it's very, very accurate and very, very fair.

(02:12:32):
But in addition to that, it also has, if you hit hold down the option key while you click on that icon, it has a million options to it. Yes. You can annotate. So I can add notes to it or I can say, or I can highlight stuff in it or say, oh, just save this part of it. Don't save these parts of it. You can have it save every single tab that's in a window. You can even set it up it so that every time you bookmark something, that bookmark is automatically downloaded and saved. And that, I'm just scratching the surface of what you can do with this. Again, it's super simple just for its one purpose, but as soon as you click on the option key or look at the, look at the, the Read Me file on the GitHub, you start to see that, oh my goodness, this is a complete solution to everything that I would ever need to do.

(02:13:13):
Not only does it replace, it doesn't just replace and enhance what I'm doing in Evernote. It creates new opportunities and new workflows that let me do things I wasn't able to do at all. So yeah, huge, huge. I mean, it's a, it's free. There is a PayPal page to, for Gilda lmo who's the head of the, the pro for head of the, and yeah, I have <laugh>, I've PayPaled him a pile of money, or excuse me, for within a freelance journalist, <laugh> journalist to scale a a pile of money. I e I could have had a lot of, I could have protein for a couple days based on what I've given him. But yeah, it is, I'm so happy with this. It is like, there's no need to look any further than beyond this for me, because anything that requires, I need to save something off the web, it's there for me and I can adapt it and use it exactly how I want it. Great stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:13:58):
That's very cool. Yeah, I, I actually downloaded the last extension you mentioned that would save it as a, a markup files, which is kind of a web clipper. Can you open, I guess it's an H T M L file, so you could open it in anything that can understand H T M L. And it looks like you can also Right. Take the subsidiary images and turn them into a single file, which would

Andy Ihnatko (02:14:19):
Be great. Again, it does, it does that automatically when you install it, you click it and there's a little box that simply appears in the lower corner, give you the progress. It has to do some crunching. 'cause Again, every single image on there gets converted to B 64. You can, I, I've just, you can open the H TML file and BB edit and look at the entire thing. It is just plain html Nice. As a plain text file. So again, you don't have to worry about, oh, did, is this a bundle? Is it, or, or is there a folder of images and other code that need to include in this, in order to say this, it's, Nope, click one button. You've got one file that even like ev I yet to find a, a browser that I use in my daily life, mobile, desktop, tablet, whatever. So

Leo Laporte (02:14:54):
It works on Safari, on iOS. No.

Andy Ihnatko (02:14:57):
Yeah. If it's an HTML file, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:14:59):
I, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:01):
I've got them. I've, I've got them, I've got my workflow set up so that it saves to a folder on my MacBook that will be synced to Google Drive. And so I can simply open these up in Google Drive. I can share them to any of the p any of the library files. Nice. Excuse me, any of the library or reader apps I've got on my iPad that will convert a web address or what HTML file to pdf f or whatever. Again, it is, I've, I've yet to see, un unlike the, when I was saving it directly under Chrome or saving it directly under Safari as save a complete webpage there, I've yet to come, come across any application or any service or whatever that couldn't simply take this H D M L file and do what I want to do with it. Whether it's read it, save it, cut, copy, paste of it in, include it in an archive. So yeah, I've, I've yet to find a problem with this at all. And again, it's just something's on, on GitHub. Just, just go get it. And it's yours.

Leo Laporte (02:15:48):
Single file on GitHub. I've installed it. <Laugh>, thank you for the tip. That's a, that's, that's a really great tip. Well, it, it won't save secondary links. It'll save the front page. It won't save the pages linked to, right. It'll

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:01):
Have to, it'll, I don't, you know, I, if, if I took, took a moment to look through all, you

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):
Only want it to 'cause that would be ridiculous.

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:08):
Yeah, yeah. But, but it's amazing all the different features that it has. Again, when I, when I come, came across a feature that any, anytime you book, anytime I book some Mark something into, I've got for, for every week, I've got a folder of here's things I actively want to track because these are stories I might wanna write or talk about. Nice. Now, now that I don't even have to think about it. If it's that easy, and if these HT m l files are so small and they are, it's like, well, why aren't I just simply saving every file that I think is important enough to save in this one special place? And so there you

Leo Laporte (02:16:36):
Go. It also has built-in annotation, which is pretty cool.

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:40):
Again, it's like, I didn't, I was use this for w before I discovered that. Yeah, it's, oh, there, here's a, here's a bar, a bar full of, oh, I can add a Post-it tab to, oh, I can highlight this. And Oh yeah, that is

Leo Laporte (02:16:49):
Handsy. It's pretty amazing.

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:50):
Gilda lmo, you are a clever, clever person. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:16:52):
You, Gil. This is a very smart guy. Very nice. Okay. Wow, that's a great find. Thank you, Andy. And thanks to all of you for being here. We are done for this week on Mac Break Weekly. We'll be back next week, of course, with Jason Snell six colors.com. Jason does a lot of stuff though, so if you go to six colors.com/jason, you can see all the shows he does. He's basically on mic all day, every day,

Jason Snell (02:17:16):
All the great shows. <Laugh>, yes. That's my microphone. It remains on at all times. And podcast just happened spontaneously. It's amazing. Not writing. It's amazing.

Leo Laporte (02:17:24):
Anything you wanna particularly plug this week?

Jason Snell (02:17:28):
I, I don't know. Check out upgrade on Relay FM or a downstream where we will talk if you're interested in weird things about the future of the streaming world downstream on Relay fm. That's where

Leo Laporte (02:17:38):
I talk

Jason Snell (02:17:38):
Julia Alexander. We'll do a new episode later this week where I'll cry again about the sad state of my beloved Cal

Leo Laporte (02:17:45):
Football team. I wanna hear an in-depth explanation of what happened there, man, by then, you will have more details. That's good. Downstream among many on Relay fm. Thank you, Jason. Andy and Ko, when are you gonna be on G B H next?

Andy Ihnatko (02:18:00):
I'm off this week, but I'm back on Thursday at 1230 in the afternoon. Go to Adobe. GBH news.org to listen to it live or

Leo Laporte (02:18:06):
Later. Very nice. Thank you, Andrew. Have a wonderful week. Stay cool. Alex Lindsay spends much of his time when he's, he's not in Hollywood making movies on Office hours.global. That is a daily broadcast you can be a part of. You can join the Zoom or you can watch on YouTube. If you go to Office Hours Global, you'll see all the shows as they go. And you can also you know, get an invite to join the Zoom call. Anything in particular excites you this week?

Alex Lindsay (02:18:40):
Later the day at four o'clock we're gonna be streaming from the sea grass floor. Oh, wow. So myself and Nick Joshin, who's head of we've got a live view. We've got some Terra decks, we've got some streaming. Oh my God. We've got some cameras and so we're gonna wander. It's, it's, it's, it's not very structured. There's a handful of people we know we're gonna go to, otherwise we're gonna wander around the floor and talk. That's

Leo Laporte (02:19:00):
The best

Alex Lindsay (02:19:00):
Fun, Josh in his head of yeah. Oh, it is. It is. It's really gonna be a great time. So, so that's gonna be one or two hours of us streaming and talking. So if you, if you're interested just look at our YouTube channel, you should be able to find it there.

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
Very cool. Live coverage of SIGGRAPH 2023 or go to Office Hours Global, but yeah, there's a YouTube channel dedicated. Thank you, Alex. That'll be fun. I'm, I look forward to watching. That

Alex Lindsay (02:19:26):
Should be a good time.

Leo Laporte (02:19:27):
Good way to go to the show without gonna the

Alex Lindsay (02:19:29):
Show. Nick. Nick is head of, he's head of immersive technol, director of Immersive technology. He's at Drexel University and, and we're old friends, so he's, it should be a pretty, it'll be both. We'll make it fun, but we'll also, it'll be probably pretty geeky conversations <laugh> about, about computer graphics.

Leo Laporte (02:19:44):
4:00 PM Pacific, 7:00 PM Eastern. Thank you all for joining us. We appreciate it. We do Mac Break Weekly on Tuesdays 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live at live dot twit tv. If you're watching Live Chat, live in our internet Relay Chat. You only need a browser just pointed to IRC TWIT tv. Of course. Club twit Discord members Get behind the Velvet Rope in our club Twit Discord and you can chat there after the fact on-demand versions of the show available at twit tv slash mb w on that page, you will see the show notes, but you'll also see links to our YouTube channel which is dedicated to Mac Break Weekly and to various podcasts catchers podcast players. You can subscribe in those. In fact, that's my suggestion is search for Mac Break Weekly in your favorite podcast player and, and subscribe.

(02:20:37):
That way you'll get it automatically. You don't even have to think about it and just be there for you. Anytime you're interested in listening to Mac Break Weekly, and we're glad you do audio and video and all of those places available. Have a great week now. It is my unfortunate duty to tell you, you gotta get back to work because break time is over. See you next time. Listeners of this program, get an ad-free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the Twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.