MacBreak Weekly 905 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Ihnatko's here. Jason Snell's here. Filling in for Alex Lindsey: the bearded tutor, the wonderful Stephen Robles, and of course we have a big, big birthday. To celebrate an anniversary, we're going to get the balloons, we're going to get the cake and we're going to see if we can boot this 40-year-old Macintosh. Next, on Mac BreakWeekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 905, recorded Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024. Tequila For Your Eyes.

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It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is here, so the warrant canary has failed. He is still in his home.

0:02:23 - Jason Snell
I'm here. I do not have a Vision Pro. I do have an original Mac behind me that is suited up.

0:02:30 - Leo Laporte
It's running too.

0:02:31 - Jason Snell
It looks like you've got Solitaire going on there I think right now no, there's some DAs Because you can't have a floppy disk that also has apps on it.

0:02:41 - Leo Laporte
So that's a Disk accessories.

0:02:43 - Jason Snell
It's got a calculator.

0:02:45 - Leo Laporte
Was it disk or deck? It was desk, it was desk accessories. Yeah.

0:02:49 - Jason Snell
So the calculator control panel and the notepad, I think, are all open. We'll tell you why he's turned that on. Multi-tasking Original Mac style.

0:02:56 - Leo Laporte
In just a moment, but we should also say hi to Andy and Ako, wg, bh and Boston. Hello, andrew.

0:03:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello Jason, I don't want to spoil it for you, but if you're stuck on the puzzle game, there's a really great surprise for finishing it A little. I don't want to ruin it for you.

0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
It's silly, I'm going to slide the numbers around until you get them in order.

0:03:16 - Jason Snell
Look forward to it.

0:03:17 - Leo Laporte
Look forward to it and I like your hat, Andrew. The Giants, San Francisco Giants World Series hat from I don't know when, yes, I was doing, I was doing some 2010.

0:03:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, okay, san Francisco. Giants baseball On the air.

0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
Let's welcome Stephen Robles, the bearded teacher. He is in the house. He's a very techfm filling in for Alex Lindsey, who is an assignment Probably testing. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Vision Pro, great to see you. You are here on an auspicious day. I could play the 1984 Apple commercial for you right now, but Apple would immediately take the show off the air and I don't want to do that. But imagine in your mind Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. On January, what was it? January 20th, 24th, which is tomorrow 1984., Apple would introduce the Macintosh.

0:04:16 - Jason Snell
And then something about you see why 1984 won't be like 1984.

0:04:25 - Andy Ihnatko
We will prevail.

0:04:27 - Leo Laporte
He just reenacted it. I don't think Apple will take that down.

0:04:32 - Stephen Robles
That only work was outstanding.

0:04:36 - Leo Laporte
He did it all with his mouth. Ladies and gentlemen, and a couple of pair old brown shoes on.

0:04:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I was going to say that I mean you're, I mean it's your show, but that's a really odd way to pay tribute to the 30th anniversary of Kevin Smith's clerks. I mean it was a great movie. I mean it could define it was like the first movie that I'd ever seen, that we're had people my age on movies that were actually talking in, like my petois, so to speak.

0:05:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm now closing something to do with that tab so that we can't accidentally play the idea. Of course it is the 40th now anniversary of Macintosh. It shipped January 24th. This was one of those things where they announced it and it shipped almost immediately. Or had they pre announced it in September, or something like that.

0:05:21 - Jason Snell
No, they did the the the Super Bowl ad and then they rolled it out, and that was on the day and they rolled it out. And they even rolled out this is a little funny quirk they rolled out Macworld magazine that day too. They had actually done a pre planning of the first issue of Macworld. Literally was at the event, which is wild, right, the access that they had behind the scenes to the Mac team.

0:05:44 - Leo Laporte
I think we all got a subscription to Macworld. As I remember, when we bought a Mac, I think you got a year subscription.

0:05:49 - Jason Snell
There was. There was that too. That deal lasted a very long time. That deal lasted like 25 years.

0:05:54 - Leo Laporte
I think the card in the box.

0:05:56 - Jason Snell
That was a. That was a big one.

0:05:57 - Leo Laporte
Mr Snell was editor in chief at Macworld.

0:06:00 - Jason Snell
For you know, 10, 15 years, something like that so I was. I was there sort of like after the salad days, but but yes, yes, I was there. I started working at Macworld and Mac user before that in the nineties, when Apple was doomed and they got better. They were doomed in the nineties. It was a bad career move. I used to go on the radio in 93 and 94.

0:06:20 - Leo Laporte
This was in the Gillamilio era and then the, the diesel Schindler, and used to say Apple, it's doomed, they're terrible, and no, the memory management on the Mac is terrible. And all that. And then Steve Jobs came back, brought next with him and that was the big, that was the big savior, and of course Bill Gates $150 million.

0:06:41 - Jason Snell
We passed. We passed the line item a little while ago. Now you have to be vague about it, but we could still say vaguely that Mac OS 10 sort of arrived at what is now kind of the halfway point of the Mac's life. But it's actually. Mac OS 10 era has actually been around a few years longer than classic Mac OS, no matter how you define those dates, because it was a fuzzy sort of three years in the middle there. Because of the next step. You're saying, yeah Well, I mean we think of the. We were celebrating 40 years of the Mac, the classic Mac OS, but about you know what? 16, 17 years after that they replaced it with that, the next step based Mac OS 10. And that's what we've had since then. So more than half its life now.

0:07:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in fact, if you look at next step and this was on the famous Steve Jobs beautiful black next cube you might say, oh, it looks a little familiar, especially the column based finder and all of that. This is, this is what got ported over to the. Apparently at the time there was some debate inside of Apple whether they should buy BOS or your next step. A BOS was beautiful and did run on Mac hardware, but Steve Jobs came with next step.

He was kind of bundled in with next step and I think next step was the right choice. And they have a lot of people, obviously in a bunch of other great people too, John Rubenstein. All right, Burke is on the ground.

We have to do this. So from in 1984, apple released on January 24th, 40 years ago tomorrow the first Mac is this, the original 128 K Mac. This is John Slendine is original. You could see it's yellowed beautifully, that beautiful patina of age, and we haven't booted this since 2013, on the 30th anniversary. So every 10 years we have a promise to attempt it could be some interesting smells to boot this up. So go ahead, burke. Oh the hard drive. You start. We've turned on the hard drive. It's spun up like a wooden spoon you can touch the switch with, just in case. Oh, there's the beep. I heard the beep. You got heard the beep. All right, you've miked it and everything. Good for you. We are now watching, is it? It's booting from a? How big is the hard drive, john?

80 megabyte, an 80 megabyte aftermarket hard drive. Who made it, do you remember? Yeah, cms, cms, and he got a scuzzy port. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Is that a sad Mac? Is that a?

0:09:01 - Jason Snell
it's. No, it doesn't, it's not seeing the disc. Yeah.

0:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Well, maybe it hasn't booted yet. Yeah, oh no, both things had to work. I hear sound. You can hear the hard drive yeah Hard drive is an actual mechanical hard drive.

0:09:13 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not a solid state replacement.

0:09:14 - Leo Laporte
Do we have some emergency floppies? We could, we could.

0:09:17 - Stephen Robles
Flopping drive needs to be replaced.

0:09:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, it's not real. Well, it's not mine.

0:09:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Which means that it could be looking at something.

0:09:26 - Leo Laporte
So if you do have, let's keep an eye on it.

0:09:29 - Jason Snell
It's an old Mac like that. Um, there's a, there's a thing called floppy emu that actually you plug into the floppy drive. That's what you're using, isn't? It A while ago. Yeah, and that's what I'm using and you put an SD card with disc images on there and it'll boot. It'll also emulate.

0:09:42 - Leo Laporte
John has it. We have a China. We have a China. Is this? Alex got this for him so that he didn't install it. So you think, is your hard drive shot? I mean your floppy drive shot? Wait a minute, is anything happening? No, no, this is worse than Al Capone's vault. So here's the floppy kids, if you're under 40, the PRAM this thing is older than you, so no wonder it's having a hard time waking up. We'll get it. He. He got an aftermarket scuzzy port put on his Mac 128k so that he could have that CMS 80, 80 Meg, not gig. I could. I could fit one shot from my Sony R seven on that, alpha seven on that. Oh, wait a minute. He's got a 20 megabyte drive. He's going to try. This is. We're going to keep working on it. Do you remember, andy, buying your first Mac?

0:10:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, there's no way in hell I could afford it. So what happened was I used to work there in England. There was a chain of like department stores called leach mirror. I used to work in the computer department and they had this was. This is back when, like teenage employees were not well supervised, they were very well trusted, which was their mistake, and so I was.

I got my first Mac. It was a 512k Mac that I bought for, I think, $77 and 77 cents, like in the like 85, 86, 87 or 87 or 88. And the reason why was because they the top was like kind of one of the vents was broken off and maybe somebody who had access to tools and knowledge might have unplugged the logic board internally and then put it back together. And then we were required to like put like things that were out of the box like on a shelf for like, for like discounts, and as the longer it stayed on the shelf, the more discounts they would like drop it down to, until it got down to 77 cents, which means that give us any money we will take it. So, yes, like what could have been like a good like $1,000 like secondhand, mike, plus I kneecapped so that I could get it. For what a teenager working at a department store after?

0:12:02 - Leo Laporte
school. How about you, steven? I think I was old enough to have bought the first Mac. I think.

0:12:07 - Stephen Robles
Now, I was late to the game. It was 2005. Oh, oh, that's my first. One was a 12 inch G for power book.

0:12:14 - Leo Laporte
You could have bought the 20th anniversary power book. So great the power book.

0:12:19 - Stephen Robles
I saw someone at college have it my freshman year and I was like I don't even know what that is because I was not in the Apple world at the time and I just I knew I needed it. I don't know why, I don't know what I was going to do with it. I was like I have to have that computer.

0:12:30 - Leo Laporte
I remember showing my father in law. The color screen on this is one of the power books. This is a later one, I think. The color screen on the power book and saying look at that, because we hadn't seen, we'd only had black and white screens up until that point. So this was a. This was a big deal. Look at that track ball. So 1984, jason, where were you?

0:12:58 - Jason Snell
I was in Sonora, california, using an Apple too is where I was and I didn't get. I didn't really use a Mac until college. We use them in high school to do like type setting, where we literally just type in our stories, our newspaper and print them in.

But no, we didn't even do that. We literally were just printing out things and cutting them up for the college or the high school newspaper and pasting them down. But in college we use page maker and that's where I fell in love. They had just gotten maxed. They needed people who were going to be comfortable learning them. I was very comfortable learning them and I fell in love to the point where by the end of my sophomore year in college I'd started my sophomore year at that newspaper. I had gone to the college bookstore and back in those. These people who are have been college students in the last 15 years will have will not understand. The college discounts used to be real good.

0:13:53 - Leo Laporte
They're not anymore, but they used to be like 40% 50% off Because they wanted to get you in the family. And then they, they wanted to hook you. Yeah, exactly.

0:14:01 - Jason Snell
So I was and I had this Apple too. I was just I had stopped using it. I essentially would go to the newspaper office and get on a Mac SE there and write my papers and things, because I didn't want to use the Apple, too, anymore. So I went to the college bookstore. They were having a sale plus the discount on the Mac SE. It was because the Mac classic was going to be coming in a few months, which was honestly not much, not any better than the Mac SE and I got. I got that Mac SE and I loved it. So that was the. That was the first I dipped into my own college bank account that I had wrote the check myself. So I that one, against perhaps the advice my parents would probably not have approved of that, but I'm like, no, I have to do it and it was absolutely the right decision to do it because I had, I had moved on and and really the rest is history I've never looked back.

0:14:49 - Andy Ihnatko
You're not kidding about those college discounts. But my first new Mac was a Mac plus, which I bought because, like I think, the price was like something like 2000, like $2,000 at the time. But the college discount price was something like 800 or 900, which I could barely swing and I, I, I gamed the system I found. I went to Northeastern University, went to like their college listings and found out that a if you're taking any classes, they will issue you a college ID and the cheapest one credit course is like 200 and something dollars. So I signed up for a course and I don't even know what it was, just for it.

0:15:26 - Leo Laporte
I spent $250 to get like a $1100 discount, so I could actually afford this smart, smart game. We do have, fortunately, the very illegal third market Torx screwdriver.

0:15:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.

0:15:38 - Leo Laporte
The reason it's so long is because Steve didn't want you to open it, and deep inside that Mac there are Torx handle Inside the handle.

So, john, apparently you think it's the machine that's not booting, because that was a serious ROM area you had over there. That was the hard drive. Oh well, the first time it was a bad hard drive. Yeah, couldn't find the system. Couldn't find the system. So he's going to open it up and put that new. You want to put the new floppy in? Open it up. We are, you know, the clock is ticking on, the instant repair of the 40 year old Macintosh. We'll see if we can get it limping.

I remember in 83, I was working at KLOK radio in San Jose. So I was, what was I? 27. I was an adult. I was so much older than you guys, so I was an adult. So in 83, I would walk by the computer store and there was a Lisa in the window and I'd press, I think almost literally press my nose against the glass going. I wish I could afford that, but it was $10,000. I wanted that so bad. But see, that set me up. Because then they announced Macintosh and even January 24th I was, you know, thinking, oh, should I? And I just I couldn't bring myself to do it. But I am a hundred day or there there for a while. They would honor people who bought a Mac within the first hundred days as the early adopters. I'd finally gotten enough gumption to go down to Macy's and Union Square in San Francisco and use my Macy's charge card, because it was $2,500. And, by the way, that's in 1984 dollars, so that is probably closer to $10,000 today. It's a lot of money $7,300.

$7,300. That gives you an idea of this is like not a trivial purchase.

0:17:27 - Jason Snell
And the Lisa. The Lisa is like the Lisa cost $30,000. It was not 10.

0:17:33 - Leo Laporte
It was ridiculous In today's money 10 back in 1983.

0:17:37 - Jason Snell
But in today's money that's 30 grand, so it's basically like a car. So the Mac was the affordable computer and it's still what we would think of today as $7,300.

0:17:46 - Leo Laporte
Crazy, but I I plunked down my card cause I wanted that 128K Mac and it was very underpowered. But it was the first 3M computer, a megapixel screen, megabyte of memory, I don't remember. The third M was mega, oh, probably a megahertz, but megahertz, a hundred megahertz or something. What was the processor? It was a 68,000. Motorola 68,000., and it was running at, I can't remember, maybe not not many megahertz, 8 megahertz, 8 megahertz, but it was a great. That was a great processor. I wrote assembly code for this processor and, unlike the x86, which was the current at the time that the PC had already come out of three years earlier, it didn't have segmented memory and a flat memory model, so you could write to all the memory without any fooling around with segments, and so it was really easy. It was fun to write for.

0:18:39 - Andy Ihnatko
It was, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't fun to use, though People forget that like one of the biggest ones there's a reason Swap floppy, remember that.

The reason why, like you could do, you could do an upgrade to the 512K Mac simply by pulling out all of the low bit chips of the 128K motherboard and putting in 512K chips. That shows you that they really, they really. They were kind of desperate to get the price down where it had to be and so, as a result, macrite had, like a limitation of, I think, nine pages. Almost anything that you did would involve, like, oh God, the swap of death where, okay, spit out your system disk, put in your app disk, spit out your app disk, put in your system disk, put in your app, as it kept. Like trying to have to swap and load things in and out of memory all the time there was.

And this was at a time when PCs were, fairly, the Apple II line was 100% mature, the PC line, the MS-DOS line, was 100% mature. So you were, there was a reason why you were a Mac owner user, and it wasn't because you wanted the most value for money or the most efficient, or it's easy to use. In some ways absolutely drove you up a tree and others. But that's why we were happy.

0:19:53 - Leo Laporte
We were happy, we were happy campers. Is this Alex Gumpel memorabilia? John, this box, this came with the 128K Mac. Just to give you an idea, this is before Apple really got packaging. Now, this is yours. So the cassettes you saved it. Yeah, you remember the cassettes. So this is a cheesy plastic box. So Apple got rid of that, which is a good thing. And inside, john, I'm amazed at your impulse control. All of the stickers, nice, still, the little tri-fold, how to use it. And back when PCs were big, you know, apple made a lot of hay on the fact that you could use this computer by just looking at this pamphlet. And, yeah, cassette. What was on the cassette? It was an audio cassette. It must have been. It wasn't data, right, all we've guided to it.

0:20:37 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, it was just it was. It was just like an audio book that would like. It would be a, it would be a video, it would be a setup video right now.

0:20:44 - Leo Laporte
And John even saved his floppy disk labels. But the floppy disks are gone. They're used. They were used to boot. It Isn't this cool. I mean why you got it. I don't.

0:20:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't. I don't have a 128. I do have like the very first like piece of software for the Macintosh ever.

0:21:02 - Leo Laporte
I have no idea what happened to my 128. Oh, look at that. What is that, oh, alice?

0:21:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, through the looking glass. That was one that one is open, one is still sealed. But yeah, that was. It was like a slideshow, right? No, no, no, it was a chess game, oh that's right. Almost impossible to play because it moved so freaking fast.

0:21:22 - Leo Laporte
Did Steven Kapps write that? I think he did yeah.

0:21:25 - Andy Ihnatko
He was by Steve Kapps right on the disk. Wow, yeah, so this was one of the demo programs.

0:21:32 - Leo Laporte
Obviously, they had to write a bunch of stuff because nobody else.

0:21:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh no, no, this wasn't a demo, this was commercial software.

0:21:36 - Leo Laporte
No, I know I'm saying, but he was at Apple when he wrote it and I think it was just to show what you could do. Here's the boot disk. This is no, this is a guided tour. So it came on floppy. Look at all these. How big were? Okay? Here's a test for you Historians. How big were these floppies? 400k, 400k. And then eventually they made double-sided and eventually they got to a little bit more. What?

0:22:03 - Andy Ihnatko
400K. No one ever was going to use a 100K of storage 400 kilobytes, but the operating system was on there.

0:22:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember, did you? I think you had to boot to multiple disks when you were booting the flop. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you'd stick disk in one end and go. You have a system disk and it had an ejector. You couldn't pull the disk out. It wasn't like a chip.

You'd chip in just one it went shh Software control eject, and then you would take it out and put the next one in, put in disk two I don't remember how many disks it was, but it was a lot of work and then copying stuff was a lot of work.

Because your operating system and your program like MacWrite, which came MacPaint and MacWrite came in the early days you would put that in and then you'd have to eject that to save your file and the copy files you'd have to swap. It was a nightmare. This is why John bought that very, I'm sure very expensive CMS external hard drive.

0:22:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, that was a very, very big. And also it shows you again the weirdness of early Mac users that of course the entire philosophy of the Mac is that this is a sealed box that you will never, ever as a user, get inside because you have no business being in there. Of course it's not expandable. Why on earth could you improve upon the perfection of the engineering we put inside here? That's why we made you go to an auto parts store to find the weird screwdriver that let you crack it open. And yet within a year or two there were companies that, okay, what if we created sort of like a big, a big, a big, a big, a clothes pin with with connectors on it that you could clip onto the actual CPU itself to add an external display, to add a hard drive, to add an accelerator. And it was the scariest thing in the entire damn world, because it was also how a lot of us learned that, oh so that CRT2 carries a thunder kick killing level of electricity even when it's powered off. Okay, good to know.

And of course eventually the clip would sort of like weaken or like pop off and suddenly everything would crash like in the most glorious fashion, because your computer would be very, very confused. So you have an accessory of hi. I'd like to be able to like run DOS software. Okay, just put it into this PC dock so you can have the ability to use your keyboard and your screen of your $3,000 computer to use what is now a $5,000 computer. You can always tell when people will do crazy silly things, to do something with a piece of hardware or software that the designers never intended or maybe even were trying to actively make you not do you know that you got something there because someone has an investment that goes far beyond the amount of money.

0:24:52 - Leo Laporte
So the Super Bowl ad was January 22nd. That's because the Super Bowl was a lot earlier back in the good old days and the MEC came out the two days later, the 24th. You could actually buy it and, as you pointed out, it was extremely expensive purchase at the time. There wasn't a lot of software for it. It came with Mac Paint, right, and Mac Wright. Mac Paint was what Steve Jobs showed when he first showed the Macintosh. Oh, we're working on it, we're taking it apart. It's very, very exciting here. Ladies and gentlemen, careful of that tube, burke. You know it's a capacitive device. It can hold electricity. Okay, I notice he's not even wearing a wrist strap, but you are standing on a giant rubber box, right. I don't know what he's doing. I think he's not insulated or anything. Here's Steve with the Susan Kare, I think, did this beautiful picture of a Japanese woman brushing her hair. It's, of course, a famous Japanese painting, but Susan Kare had to do it pixel by pixel in Mac Paint. She was an expert at that. It came with Mac Paint. It came with Mac Wright.

Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon pretty quickly. By April Microsoft had a copy of its program. Was it Word? I guess it was Word back in the day Still is and Multiplan, which was their which pre-excel spreadsheet. This is, according to Wikipedia Microsoft Word I'm sorry Multiplan came out in April, migrated from MS-DOS and Microsoft Word January 85. A year later, macintosh Office Suite came out the same year. That was the Lemmings ad. So after insulting IBM users with the 1984 ad, they really doubled down and had apparently these were PC users jumping off a cliff because they were all following one another. Wow, the ad did not work. According to Wikipedia.

0:26:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It was. The entire launch is kind of noteworthy because of exactly how well thought out it was, because you knew the stories of all of the key engineers who went into it. They were like studio photos of like almost like a class picture of IBM.

0:27:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, credit to Steve for doing that, because that was back in the day when they didn't really tell you who had made your software, who had made your hardware.

0:27:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, everybody signed the back of it, that was pretty darn cool In fact.

0:27:17 - Leo Laporte
hey, do you have the case there? Is it open, can we? Once you get the case open, let's look inside.

0:27:23 - Andy Ihnatko
This is like remember that Francis Ford Copeland movie Tucker, where, like they're announcing the brand new car up front with the dancing girls, Meanwhile on the back they're desperately hammering and putting wood into the suspension.

0:27:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have to feel like some of that was happening, john. Can you see inside the plastic of the case? As soon as you get that? Okay, they're still. It's still attached by a variety of cables. As soon as they can, we'll look. This was something interesting because you, you were never, ever, intended to do what we're doing, which is open this thing up, right? Steve in fact designed it that way. He didn't want anybody going inside it. This is Steve Jobs in his heyday, where you know no users going inside my device. But nevertheless he got the designers to sign the plastic of the case, the molds for the plastic. I wonder, why? Do you think he thought someday, like now, 40 years later, people would be opening it up and go oh look, andy Hertzfeld, steve Caps.

0:28:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I think the line was all artists signed their work.

0:28:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, great artist ship. He also said they had a pirate flag up on the on this building. That was kind of a part from the infinite loop campus.

0:28:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I guess Steve Levy's like original book on the development of the Macintosh is still like just great reading, even it's not out of date at all, cause it's just such good storytelling. It really is all about how, like Apple, the, the, the, the grownups where Apple was at a state where the board wanted a quote, grown up and quote to be running the company that was not, in their eyes, going to be Steve Jobs. So the grownups who are running the company were like pushing Steve Jobs into the. Oh, isn't that nice. The founder is still with the company and he's still like helping. Isn't that adorable, that'll be great for like interviews and stuff like that.

And Steve Jobs was like no, you don't understand, I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me, I need deliberately went out to say okay, give me my own engineering group, oh, sure. And then I was like I'm going to run a little project. And his project was I'm going to undermine the Lisa by making a version of it that is better than it, less expensive, more attractive and more marketable. And how about that? And that's why there was a. There was a pirate flag on top of the building, cause they were on their own unit. As for both of pretty much nobody, because he was stealing people from from Apple, from the Apple II division, stealing people from wherever. It's quite a story.

0:29:49 - Jason Snell
Here is the point out. Here's the case. Yeah, oh, look at that.

0:29:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so, and, by the way, there is something you can. You can wash this with to get the yellow away, but I don't think you should.

0:30:01 - Jason Snell
So where are the signatures in here? They were beige to begin with.

0:30:05 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, these were not this color and all the ones that they were more than you would, they weren't white, I mean they were always a little yellow.

Oh yeah, he was never done white. So where are the? Oh, you have to put it. Oh, I see it Like you can. I don't know if you guys are going to be able to see it because it is very finely embossed, but if I put now, do you have an over the head Breaking light? He's thinking the over the head. Oh, I have it upside down, so we want to see the people's names. I'm going to have to turn it right side up. Yeah, I thought you know I've never seen this. I've never. I never got inside one of these. But you can kind of see when I shine the light like this. There's Andy Hertzfeld right there. Let's see if I can, if I move this. Where can you see better? Oh well, you can kind of see that there's signatures there. Where's Steve Steve's signature? I'm looking. His signature is pretty probably at the top, you would think, right.

0:31:07 - Andy Ihnatko
No, it's, I think it's. I remember being lower right.

0:31:11 - Leo Laporte
There's Daniel Cotty, who is Steven's roommate and wrote the technical documentation for it didn't get any stock either, was neck famously gave cocky some of his, but this is in the early days of Apple.

0:31:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Am I remembering the quote right with it? Again one of those famous Steve Jobs stories about where, oh well, we kind of feel as though some of these employees we founded the company like kind of got screwed out stock option. So we're all kicking in like the equal amount to the level pool and Steve Jobs like great, I'll kick in zero.

0:31:40 - Leo Laporte
Zero is my kick in. Yeah, they went. Yeah, here's Jeff Raskin's name. Now he really deserves a lot of credit, because even though he was kind of on the outs by the time the Macintosh came out, he was the one who said we want to make a consen appliance computer.

0:31:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he started the project and led it until Steve took it over. Yeah, and he came up with Macintosh I believe right, I can't remember.

0:32:04 - Leo Laporte
There's Haphorn. Wow, this is really cool. I still don't see Steve Jobs name, but I guess that's fitting because of the famous wonderful people that I am seeing. Yeah, and then here there's looks like Bill Atkinson, of course, who's a great guy and still very active in the community, as is Andy I always wondered what happened to the art master.

0:32:24 - Andy Ihnatko
What they did was they passed around an engineering piece, an engineering plot that had like the part that was going to be made. So it was just a piece of paper and they just passed it around the entire team over however many days and everybody actually physically signed this one thing, and then they turned that into a, basically an offset. They basically used that as a mold, that wherever there was ink, that would be like a cut out in the mold so that plastic would fall into it and that would be like the embossing. But I've always wondered what happened to the original piece of paper that has the signatures of Steve Jobs and everybody who worked on it. That would be somebody. Somebody is saying I'm not even saving this for when I need to build a house or send kids to college. I'm saving this in case I need desperate medical care.

0:33:07 - Leo Laporte
I think they should put it on Voyager 7 or something you know. Send it out to.

0:33:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Grave it on a piece of gold and ship it out to be on the rim.

0:33:19 - Leo Laporte
Really people might be wondering why we're making such a big deal about the 40th anniversary, but it really humanized computing. Ibm's PC came out in 1981 and it was intended for your desktop and you know I had one and it was very much a desktop computer. But everybody kind of looked to Apple to make computing human scale, not for business, something you might want to have in your home.

0:33:44 - Jason Snell
All consumer personal computers. At that point we can ask the risk because they were like the.

0:33:48 - Leo Laporte
Xperia. Oh, the Commodores and the Vick 20.

0:33:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but all of them and the Apple II right, apple's own computer, they're all command line computers. So the real revelation and people don't even, I think, understand this now was this idea that you had a graphic interface and a mouse or other you know pointer control device and a menu bar and everything was visual instead of literally the only thing being like a terminal window that you typed commands into. The Mac did that and it was kicking against the tide and it took years for people to understand that interface. In fact it really took until Microsoft did Windows and then everybody sort of got with the program, but like the Mac was the only one. And then Amiga came in and the Amiga from Commodore was similar but like it was an outlier, it won. In the end it was right, right, but at that time it was not so certain.

Even inside Apple the Apple II still sold really well. People think now, like once the Mac came out, the Apple II was dropped. The Apple IIe was incredibly popular. It was the driver of Apple revenue. Apple released two completely new Apple II models after the Mac was announced.

0:35:03 - Leo Laporte
I remember To see in the 2GS In 1984, apple had an event called Apple II Forever at the Moscone Center. Apple II Forever. Here's Steve. I know you can't really see it, but there's Steve Jobs. Thank you, adam Sink, who said it's middle column, fourth down, and there it is. You know, I admire Steve for not being the first on the list, not having it not doing, not pulling the John Hancock and having a giant signature at the bottom, but really just being one of a team and it really was an incredible team of super talented people who worked their butts off to make this thing, you know if everybody should check out the Apple History Project because it's documenting all of the individual stories of again.

0:35:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Steve Lee's book is amazing, but now we're. It was written not necessarily within the same sort of generation of time as the release of the Macintosh. This is people who are retired, people who are older, who have lots of perspective. So if they might have had like rose colored glasses at the time they no longer do, if they might have had resentments, now they see that with again the additional perspective and context and there's it's very, it's a very, very experiential sort of thing hearing all these histories.

0:36:18 - Leo Laporte
Andy Hertzfeld put this together. It's at folkloreorg Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh and the people who made it. There's 123 stories here. Most recent is it looks like Bill Atkinson's joining Apple Computer. Is that the most recent? Look at? Look at Bill he's. He wrote this on the 40th anniversary of joining Apple Computer, which had been 2018. So, but just some amazing, amazing stuff. Yeah, I've read it. I've read this cover to cover. It'd be a great book, you know. I mean, I think it is.

0:36:54 - Jason Snell
I think they made it into the book.

0:36:55 - Leo Laporte
They make a book Good, I think that's the revolution in the Valley.

0:36:57 - Jason Snell
Book is the contents of folkloreorg.

0:37:00 - Leo Laporte
Just incredible yeah. Oh yeah, there it is. There's a picture of revolution in the Valley. I guess it must be the insanely great story of how the Mac was made. Andy published it as a book Later, nice.

0:37:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Riley, yeah, Again, that's part of the part of the press photos that they had. Again, let's get everybody together. So, you know, the engineers, they even. They even got another photo session together of, again for marketing purposes, to make people think that, hey, this isn't just a toy machine. We've actually got the leading, leading software development companies in the world like supporting it. So you have, like Bill Gates, you have three other, four other CEOs that the CEO of the company that published the PFS series all together in custom little golf shirts with their logos on them, like around the Macintosh, to show, hey, look at all the, all the firepower we've got behind this.

It was, I think it, it, it. It feels like a hallmark event in how Apple understood that you can't just put it out there and people will figure it out. You also can't just simply, hey, we'll just make some mass market commercials of, and while while dad's balancing his checkbook, mom is in the kitchen looking up recipes. Like you, you have to. Basically, here is the story that we are telling through this machine and we're going to tell you the story of it by giving you the people who actually put it together. It's kind of a master stroke, yeah.

0:38:22 - Leo Laporte
Look at the, look at all the names, many of whom resonate still today. A great team, yeah, who did a great thing. 40 years ago, the Macintosh came out and I'm the only one on the panel who had that original. No, no, john had it original 128 K Mac. That was good for nothing. I think I bought a Mac plus as soon as they came out, and then the was there a 512 K first, and then the Mac plus, and slowly I probably owned almost every Mac from day one. Yeah.

0:38:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, at the Boston computer society there used to be like soldering parties where people would club together to buy the file, the 512 K chips, and because you had ordered them in quantity to get like any way a good discount. And then because not everybody had desoldering tools, not everybody knew how to solder, it would be just three tables full of boards and people laboriously, one contact at a time, removing the old chips, one contact at a time, soldering in the new chips and then praying to God that it posts when you turn it back on again, because you bridge one thing and that could be it for the entire motherboard, like that. That's how insane a lot of people originally were, or also how annoyed they were about all the disc swaps.

0:39:37 - Leo Laporte
Frankly, this is from Wikipedia. Apple spent two and a half million dollars purchasing all 39 advertising pages in a special post-election issue of Newsweek and ran a test drive of Macintosh promotion in which potential buyers of the credit card I didn't know this could take home a Macintosh for 24 hours and return it to a dealer afterwards. 200,000 people more than bought the Vision Pro. 200,000 people participated. Dealers disliked the promotion. The supply of computers was insufficient for demand and many were returning in such bad condition they could no longer be sold. This marketing campaign caused John Scully, the CEO at the time, to raise the price from $2,000 to $2,500. Computers sold well nonetheless, reportedly outselling the IBM PC Jr but it's rubber chicolet keys which also began shipping early that year. One dealer reported a backlog of more than 600 orders for the Mac. By April 84, the company had sold 50,000 Macs and hoped for 70,000 by early May and almost a quarter of a million by the end of the year.

0:40:40 - Jason Snell
Another thing worth mentioning. You mentioned the IBM PC, but it's not the era before PCs, but it is the era before PC clones. So it's still an era where every computer is different and it's its own platform and the Mac that benefited from that until that moment where the PC clones came in and then Windows came on top of it and then it became this kind of minority platform. But you can see why they said the computer for the rest of us like not having it be a command line where you have to guess or look at a manual you can explore with the mouse and all the commands exist in that menu structure. These were the huge leaps forward that made it much more friendly for regular people. They weren't wrong and they were the only ones out there with it at the start.

0:41:29 - Andy Ihnatko
There were clones didn't become a really big deal until the fact 512 came out. There were some.

0:41:35 - Leo Laporte
You didn't have the very beginning to the first, the very first, in the 1980s.

0:41:39 - Andy Ihnatko
It was the first mess marker. The first ones were 1982, but it was barely compatible. That was the compact. Was the three 1984.

0:41:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but it picked up momentum and then I mean, then the Mac went being one of a bunch of weird operating systems to being the minority platform where the majority platform was the PC, and that I mean I was thinking about the other day. In some ways this is the best time, the best time ever for the Mac, because the Mac was always under threat. Right, it was not the big computer at Apple, it was because the Apple too, it was not PC compatible. And then Windows 95 really put it in the ground in a lot of ways. It got back on its feet with the, with the iMac and then the iPod Halo effect that got rehabbed, apple's brand but like and then. And then they had the power PC problems where they were behind Intel. It was really the Intel processor transition that got the Mac sort of to parody in a lot of ways. And then the Apple Silicon transition has taken into the stratosphere. But you know, the Mac was always kind of an underdog throughout most of its life.

0:42:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, there is a I've been thinking a lot of because of the anniversary, about, like, how wonderful this whole story is that you start off with, and because it's reductive to say, though, and then Apple smashed the, smashed the window with the Mac, with the Macintosh, and nothing was the same ever again. And it's like, well, it was. It's more interesting to like know about the tech demo, the greatest tech demo of all time in like 1969, 1970, which showed off here is research level hardware and software to show what we think the future direction of computing could be If lots of things start to align. Then Xerox said, okay, we took those ideas and we made a commercial, albeit industrial, computer, the the star that will mouse, keyboard documents, things like that. Apple said that's nice, but that's really not a consumer product. We made that into something that people could actually afford and people would actually want to use.

And then Microsoft for all 1817, 16 year old Andy used to say about how horrible Microsoft Windows is. Microsoft also did something brilliant and an engineering triumph, which is okay. Now let's try to figure out how to make this something software, this complex work on commodity hardware, not proprietary hardware, where here is a bill of bill of materials that you will have to buy. If you assemble these in the right order, it will run our operating system and it will eventually find your printer and your scanner and your modem. So it's everybody. Everybody took the ball and moved it down the down the field to get us to this point where we have Macintoshes, and God how horrible computing would be without the presence of Macintoshes. We have Windows machines, and God, how horrible computing would be if we only could buy the stuff that Apple decided to sell as a window mouse, keyboard sort of device. And now we've got mobile devices and on top of that, each with a part of that story that got told. It's amazing.

0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's take a break. That's the celebration. Woohoo, have some cake. We're glad it exists. We are very glad it exists. I hope it continues to exist in this, in the state that it is. It is a wonderful thing. Oh, you're putting it back together. We're going to try to boot it. These are. This is a brave bunch here. Burke is an expert at this kind of stuff. John Slanning is 128k Mac undergoing a little open heart surgery, but it will be.

0:45:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I admire people. I admire people who have the love for the original hardware I love running the software and emulation.

I just don't have the patience for, okay, I have to recap everything. And also, these, these mechanical drives are not going to function. Also, the control yoke on this CRT needs to be retuned. Also, everything that's made out of plastic or rubber in here is degrading and off gassing and basically we're coming back to Jesus and its component forms. It's like there are people there. There is actually the Mac SC.

I'm sorry I will go to commercial, I know, but the Mac SC of course has the most notorious case of like, I think, a backup battery that, soldered to the board, that just goes to, goes to hell and corrodes the hell out of the entire board. And there is so much interest in saying no, I don't want to just put use it as a case for Raspberry Pi running emulation. There are people who have made a clone of the Mac, of the Mac SC 30 board, so that you can depopulate what's left of your board. Install all those components on the this new, brand new design board and everything will plug in and everything will be completely compatible. And it's not. It's not an emulation thing, it's like no, we wanted, we basically re-engineered the entire board so that it would be component to component compatible. That is dedication, that is love man.

0:46:34 - Leo Laporte
We got a couple of guys in our Discord club, twitter Discord, who are Apple veterans, who were there when Jobs was fired, were there when the Mac was released and of course, there was a conflict between the Mac division and John Scully's Apple II division, and Scully saw all the money Apple II was making and all the money that Apple Macintosh was costing and that really was the catalyst for firing Steve and starting off on a very bad, bad note. Very, very interesting stuff. I have to talk to these guys. Don and Bobby, that's nice to have you in our. I heard a beep. I heard a beep. Let's see what that beep pretends. I know, wait, was the beep just? Was it a power on self-test or anything? No, it didn't do anything, it just beeped.

0:47:22 - Jason Snell
It's just, it's a power on indicator that it's and then it goes to the next screen.

0:47:26 - Leo Laporte
We've come a long way, from the beep to the bong bong, although most Macs nowadays have that chime turned off right now boot, I think it come turned off, you don't want to give away your position for the rest of safety feature.

All right, Let us take a break, Come back. Well, there is news actually quite a bit of news, Just as Apple that we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. We're about to celebrate the first anniversary of a brand new Apple product. Not an anniversary, the birthday of a brand new Apple product. We'll talk about that in a bit, but first a word from our sponsor, DeleteMe.

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0:50:39 - Stephen Robles
I did and I got the the one terabyte version. Oh, you went all in I went all in because I didn't want to be a year in and see a 20 foot wide window in VR. Tell me my storage was full.

0:50:52 - Leo Laporte
That's future proofing, all right.

0:50:54 - Stephen Robles
Way to go. I was really trying to get in store pickup because I wanted an early appointment. But at least here in central Florida those appointment times went very quickly. Yeah, they did. The payment was failing and then it would, you know, kick me back over to schedule a new appointment time, and all the stores in like a 50 mile radius, you know, got to the afternoon times very quickly. So I was like, well, let's just deliver to me. So it's coming delivery, We'll see.

0:51:18 - Leo Laporte
All right, yeah, but you did you order eyeglasses for it. You're wearing glasses.

0:51:23 - Stephen Robles
I did. I don't know if I should admit this on the air, but I hadn't had an eye exam in a little while, so I had a prescription. It might not have been as recent as I doctored no pun intended the prescription to be but anyway, prescription. I got size and those. Actually they approved the prescription like same day. You know, I pre-ordered it Friday morning at 8am. My upload of my prescription maybe 10 minutes later, and then I'd say about three hours later, I got an email from Zeiss saying it's being sent out. They'll be delivered February 2nd at the latest. So I got those coming and I got every accessory you know which. We didn't hear about it.

0:52:00 - Leo Laporte
You got the $200 plastic travel case.

0:52:03 - Stephen Robles
I mean. I got to make videos about this stuff. I got to get it all I got it all. Yeah.

0:52:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Spiky is offering sexy battery holder. They're already third party battery holder.

0:52:11 - Stephen Robles
Oh man, you did it all. And the. There was the other thing too the, yeah, the Belkin thing, yeah, that was the battery holder. So I got it all. I got everything.

0:52:19 - Leo Laporte
Well done, bravo. What was your final bill?

0:52:23 - Stephen Robles
Oh my goodness. Well, I also got monthly Apple care, but after that I think it was probably like 4,600 because the accessories themselves is 500, because 200 for a battery, 200 for the travel case and then like 50 for the Belkin thing, and then yeah but it doesn't come with a vision pro light seal.

0:52:40 - Leo Laporte
You have to order that for another $200.

0:52:42 - Stephen Robles
It comes with that. It comes with that, oh yeah.

0:52:45 - Leo Laporte
If you have a sweaty forehead, yeah sure.

0:52:47 - Stephen Robles
Right, my, my call was Jason Aitzen. He tried a vision pro at WWDC and he was like that part of the vision pros probably going to get nasty after a month, and I don't know about the wash ability of those things yet, so that's why they're selling them separately as well.

0:53:02 - Leo Laporte
Excuse me, but $199 is outrageous, as is $190 for the travel case outrageous. That's 50 cents of plastic.

0:53:10 - Jason Snell
That's so annoying I mean the good news is that all the third party stuff will be out.

0:53:15 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Spigen already has a case for a lot less. Anyway, I'm glad you thought it was interesting.

0:53:20 - Stephen Robles
on the travel case they actually have it written out with the Apple icon and then the words vision pro rather than the word Apple vision pro. So this seems to go both ways. But I also don't know if you guys saw it today the Apple store app. If you go there you can now do the augmented reality vision pro in your office or whatever, and so I did that and like it's going to be pretty big, Like I did the AR thing, oh look, that's cool.

Yeah, and that in the travel case, this is not going to be very travel. I don't know. It's not going to be easy to take a round. It's going to be pretty big.

0:53:54 - Leo Laporte
But you did it because it's your job and I commend you for that. Andy, did you buy? I cannot afford 35.

0:54:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I posted about this, basically saying that I do not begrudge somebody first having 3500 bucks 4000 bucks to spend on a flutter for this. That's not me right now. I bought the first. I bought the first Newton message pad. I bought the first iPhone. I bought the first iPad.

All of those passed a certain test that I put for whenever I'm spending more than a burrito is worth the money on tech. And the thing is, I can't see right now how the vision pro is going to solve problems for me, make my life easier or give me more opportunities, including creative opportunities like things I would love to develop or things I'd like to create. And so I end. And finally, number four my panic play date doesn't do any of that stuff either, but I can swing 200 bucks for a play date. I really. If I'm spending 3500 bucks on something it's going to be like on a really great new set of monitors for my office, a great new Mac, a great new all these things will help me again create new things, have new ideas and explore. For now again, I say for now. That doesn't mean that I'm judging the. I'm prejudging the vision pro as being something that's not going to be worth 3500 bucks. If I again, if I was making 10 times as much money as I am right now, yeah, I'd be in with both fists.

0:55:21 - Stephen Robles
Yes, plain, you could have infinite monitors at any size you want, all around your office. That's the beauty of it. Heavy D monitors.

0:55:28 - Andy Ihnatko
How heavy. But I don't see, I don't. I don't need another thing. See, my, my, my default setting in terms of sloth and inertia is already. I mean, I don't need something that like is going to lick me. Oh, actually, I could just like basically be flat on my back on my bed with a split keyboard, playing with basically using 18, 18 different virtual monitors. I like the idea that's occasionally like I need to get up and walk. I like the idea that occasionally I have to like shift my my focus from one thing to another.

I, I, I'm, I'm so looking forward to reports from people like you and Jason and everybody else about how it's going to be to actually use this in a productive environment. I've seen a lot of like samples about here's what it would be like to be editing videos in this, and it looks hey great. I would love to have like eight different monitors stretched to exactly the right sizes that I want them to be for every task I want to do. I'm just not convinced that. I need the firsthand experience from other people to say but my work day is usually like two or three hours of work across four, like two to four different work sessions, with maybe a half hour to an hour break in between. Am I going to want to wear this thing on my face through even like a single three hour workspace? Jason did you did.

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
You head your bets in order one, just in case you don't get a review unit, or absolutely yeah, I got up at 5am just through and.

0:56:51 - Jason Snell
I got up at 5am to pay $4,000 for something. Yeah, I was really happy about it, so I got up.

0:56:58 - Leo Laporte
I was on the East coast, so I got up at eight, went through the whole thing, scanned my face the scanning is exactly like registering for face ID got right to the end of it, gave him my prescription and then chickened out. I said I can't justify this.

0:57:14 - Jason Snell
I had. I had somebody ask me, like you know why, why did you buy it? Why are you grasping about buying it? I think the answer is look, this is a one point of hardware that I, as somebody who covers Apple, I decided that it. You know I need to. I'm not going to step off of a brand new Apple platform. I got to be there, like Stephen. It's very much like I'm going to. I'm going to be one of those people who's talking about this in the early days and telling you what the deal is.

But if I was a regular consumer, right, like, under no circumstances should you buy this. As a regular consumer is like, is it worth it for me? And not like, yeah, I wanted, I wanted it's new, it's the new hotness until at least, like, reviewers have experienced it. Like there's a. I know that if you want to get it on the day of you're going to spend the money, you're going to get it, and a lot of us are people who, like, want to be on the bleeding edge. But for most people, like you, want to know.

All we know now is what Apple wants us to know. Right, and that's fine, that's marketing, but, and the fact that they were able to sell out of their whatever 80,000 on launch day, and they and there are various estimates. I think Ming-Chi Kuo has an estimate that they may have sold 180,000 of them, which is is the demand, and is that all the demand there is? We don't know. But here's the thing. I think there will be more demand from people who are sitting on the sidelines wanting to know what the heck this thing is, but right now, all we have is Apple's word for it, and I think we're going to learn a lot from people like me and Stephen and all the.

YouTubers and everything else who are taking this plunge where we're going to be honest and say what it does and doesn't do well, and then people will. I think there's a whole other wave of people who are waiting for that, so I don't blame anybody for saying that's a lot of money for something where I have to take it on faith from only Apple marketing about what this product is.

0:59:05 - Leo Laporte
By the way, if you want to get it now, there's a month, I think a month lag. I checked the other day. That was pushed out till March. Micah Sargent also ordered one. He has an in-store fitting, so he'll he'll be able to go into the store. Did you get an in-store fitting, Jason? Are you getting your ship?

0:59:22 - Jason Snell
No, no, I'm going to get a ship here, because I'm an anti-social maniac.

0:59:25 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to go to my store and watch a half hour, and if it doesn't fit, then I've got.

0:59:29 - Jason Snell
the Cordomana era store is one exit up the freeway, so if it doesn't fit I'll deal with it, but I don't want to talk to you. We'll have Micah.

0:59:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to figure out if I get a camera crew in, with Micah to to. I doubt they'll let me shoot the delivery, but anyway, go ahead, Steven.

0:59:44 - Stephen Robles
It was interesting. In the Apple store app earlier today it actually said check back today at 3pm Eastern, so about 20 minutes ago, for more availability, and so it's seen. I'd never seen that before for an Apple product, and so it seems like maybe they're going to open up some more in-store pickups right now as we record. So if you see me looking weird in every direction, okay, you can do it.

1:00:06 - Leo Laporte
Just say, hey, I'm doing it now Cause you want, you want to get it in store. You should set up a little spike camera on your forehead or something, and oh, he's doing it.

1:00:17 - Stephen Robles
Look at he's doing it. He's doing it now. There he is. That was the first scan. You have to do that.

1:00:21 - Leo Laporte
You have to order another one to get it in store.

1:00:24 - Stephen Robles
Every time yeah.

1:00:26 - Leo Laporte
And you have to send him your phony prescription. No, it was my real prescription.

1:00:30 - Stephen Robles
It's my real prescription. I know it worked. You can see now, so it'll work.

1:00:35 - Leo Laporte
So there are on eBay right now 17,000, plus listings for Vision Pro. Let me see, let's, let's, let's get it in by sort by price. Just I'm curious what the highest price is. No, I'm not going to buy an 18,000. Here we go, here's $10,000. Now you'd have to be insane $9,000. Don't do it. Don't do it If you just short sort it more reasonably by. However, I had it sorted before. There are even some at 4500. You know, there's, there's. I mean, I guess that's a thousand dollar premium, isn't it $6,000.

1:01:21 - Stephen Robles
It says check back later for availability, by the way. Okay, so keep checking. Okay, here's one for $2,600.

1:01:28 - Leo Laporte
I think that that's probably a lie. I wouldn't buy it for a thousand less, no. Yeah, here's a $2,000 one, oh God. Well, for a terabyte I'm going to. You know what. That's such a good deal. I'm going to go right. Choo Diddy, one wouldn't lie to me, would he.

1:01:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Check to see. I think we have to keep checking AliExpress to see, like, how fast that they're making the knockoff Android version of this that looks exactly like that and is packaged exactly like that. I'm sure that I'm sure it's coming because they've they've maybe, what you're buying. They flabbered everything.

1:02:04 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, well, that's exciting. A week from tomorrow you'll get, a week from Friday or other you'll get it. And so in two weeks we'll have our first looks on the show and we're going to get Ray Maxwell's getting one. I imagine. Alex Lindsey will have one, jason will have one, michael will have one. We'll have a bunch of people sitting around the table with scary eyes looking at you.

Yeah, Can't wait. I'll be the only one that looks normal. I'll be very curious. I personally am very skeptical. One of the immediate downsides Mark German noted this is that Spotify, Netflix and YouTube have all declined to make a custom app for the Vision Pro. This is their revenge, by the way, for Apple's 30% big in the store they're going yeah, or to have their iPad apps available.

1:02:57 - Jason Snell
They've withheld their iPad apps, which you have to opt out to get them out of the store, and they have done so. Netflix recently, in fact, apple apparently had been using the iPad app people inside Apple and then suddenly they revoked that as well. So that is that's right. That is kind of the revenge.

I mean, there's a web browser and all that, but this is an example of Apple not having like. Why? Why do they want to support Apple's platforms, especially if they feel like the benefit is to Apple and not to them? So I get it.

1:03:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I think it's also a simple case of they know that, look, this is what's the upside for us. Even if you, even if you think that it's just a kid, how easy is it going to be to make an Apple Vision Pro version of the Netflix app or the YouTube app? It's human, it's human resources, it's money resources, it's time, it's support resources. But even you say, well, all I have to do is like, do nothing and people will be able to run the iPad app. Well, no, there's still going to be people who are going to be calling in Netflix support, youtube support, saying, hey, I've got an Apple Vision Pro and this is not working correctly the way that I want it to. It's an offer, all the reach and reach into what will probably be a max of 500,000 users the first year.

I don't think it's. It's not like it's going to be like a lifetime, a life of the product ban, a nation. It's more like, look, we got other things to do. We got our own like antitrust suits that we're trying to fight here. We've got our own subscriber problems we're dealing with. Like we don't need this and I'm glad. I'm glad Apple and Disney sitting in a tree, kss, ing. I'm glad, like you're really, really happy to work together on Vision Pro. Have fun with it, enjoy the Safari experience on Netflix, because that's pretty much all we can do for you right now.

1:04:29 - Leo Laporte
I saw somewhere that there are, at this time, 170 Vision Pro apps, which is a good number. It's been Alex Lindsey's contention that this is the thing a developer should jump on, because the people who spend that much money for a device are going to be hungry for apps to run on at any price. So this is a great opportunity for a developer to have an app ready.

1:04:51 - Jason Snell
I don't think it pencils out unless you're selling your app for like 20 or 30 bucks ahead. I don't think it pencils out necessarily. And I think the counter argument might be that if somebody weird psychology thing here somebody spends $3,500 and up on a headset Maybe they actually are like, do I really want to throw more money at this thing, rather than I have all the money in the world and it doesn't matter. However, I think one of the arguments here is, if you're a small developer especially is first off, you will get Apple's attention, and that's a, in this case, a good thing. You will get Apple's marketing attention.

There are a lot of developers out there who adopt new Apple platforms and new Apple features on day one or before day one and they get promoted, they get used in videos, they get on stage at WWDC. There are benefits to being in Apple's good graces about marketing. And secondly, if you've got a bunch of people who are diehards, who are trying this thing out, and your app is there and you also have an app for iPhone or iPad or whatever, you can increase the visibility of your more kind of high volume app that's on a platform that's used by more people and that can benefit you too. So there are some arguments to be made, but the bottom line is if you're selling a $4 app or something and they're only going to be 400,000 of these, how much time should you put in? That's the question, right?

1:06:05 - Leo Laporte
So what is the difference between watching Netflix in Safari, which you will be able to do and say, watching a Disney movie in the Disney Plus app? Is it's still a screen right?

1:06:16 - Stephen Robles
It's not downloads you can't download it.

1:06:18 - Jason Snell
So you can't download it in Netflix. Disney's going to have those immersive backgrounds and Disney will have 3D movies that you will be able to watch, and that won't be the case with Netflix. So there are a bunch of reasons. I think Netflix in the browser will be fine, but, as Steven said, no downloads, which is bad for the whole. Watch a movie on a plane, thing that. I was selling people on.

1:06:39 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, Right, and I'm actually flying in March to podcast movement and I will have the Vision Pro and my plan to try to use it on a plane. I was going to be probably the only wild looking person on there, but it's going to be a Marvel movie, Steven.

1:06:52 - Jason Snell
That's what it's going to be now. It's going to be Thor 2.

1:06:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, Don't watch Thor 2. This just confirms my choice.

1:07:00 - Andy Ihnatko
That's no problem. Just load it on an SD card or, I'm sorry, a micro SD card. Use the micro SD card slot on the side.

1:07:05 - Stephen Robles
I will say as soon as I get mine, I'm going to be fucking. He's being facetious.

1:07:08 - Leo Laporte
Folks just in case you get excited.

1:07:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry.

1:07:11 - Stephen Robles
I'm going to plug a USB-C hub into that battery pack on the Vision Pro because I want to know what you can actually use.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that'd be interesting yeah.

1:07:18 - Stephen Robles
There is a files app on the Vision Pro.

1:07:21 - Jason Snell
Oh, so maybe, so you could bring your movies on an SSD which you plug into your battery, which you then Developers apparently have had like a USB-C strap that attaches, that lets you tether it to Xcode on a Mac, and I don't know whether that will ever be available and if that's the only way you can do USB or if there's something with the USB pass-through that will actually let you do it. But there are some questions about access because it probably is all just going to be cloud-based. But there will be video. I mean mark my words right Like there will be a video player app, like there is for the Quest, where you can go out to a UPNP server or just an SMB share and take a file and download it and put it in there. I mean those apps if they aren't already in the store. They will be generic video player apps like Plex-like things. Those will all be there, yeah.

1:08:12 - Stephen Robles
One of the challenges for me is to make a video on this. You can airplay what you see in Vision Pro to like a Mac and even to an iPhone and iPad, and so I could record the airplay stream, but there's going to be a lot of latency there and it's going to be low res. I want to know can I connect this HDMI out so I can maybe screen record that? I don't know. I don't know.

1:08:31 - Leo Laporte
Remember in the early days of the iPhone they made a really fancy rig that was Apple, only to show the iPhone screen. I remember Alex Lindsey talking about trying to duplicate that. Eventually you were able to get video out of the iPhone, but it took years.

1:08:45 - Jason Snell
I actually wonder if you'll be able to do screen recording, Stephen, and if that might be the best way to do it.

1:08:48 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be great.

1:08:49 - Jason Snell
Turn on screen recording and then it'll just save it to your capacious one terabyte of storage and then you can get it off of there later, maybe not?

1:08:57 - Stephen Robles
I got that one terabyte. I'm just saying. I will say that.

1:08:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I have some external storage for your iPad.

1:09:03 - Stephen Robles
I do have some concerns for smaller developers because it's iPad apps that can run on Vision Pro natively. You can just whatever, leave the box checked. But I've talked to some developers who have iPad apps and use the Apple Pencil as a main point of using the application. Whatever those features may be and the Vision Pro, it's going to be a very different input method and if I want to edit podcasts like I do on iPad in Vision Pro, I don't know how that's going to work with just pinch gestures and like doing this to zoom in.

1:09:32 - Leo Laporte
I can tell you one thing You're going to have a splitting headache at the end of the day.

1:09:37 - Jason Snell
That's the big difference. That's the big question for me is the ergonomics Right? People are like, oh, what do you think about the software? It's like, okay, well, one is the weight is going to be question number one Right, like that is the most important thing.

1:09:48 - Leo Laporte
And already some reviewers have said now they haven't allowed the reviewers to wear the top strap, but some reviewers have already said, including Marquez Brownlee wow, this thing is heavy, although ironically it's not heavier than the Quest Pro, but the Quest Pro has a top strap that offloads some of the weight. So you'll definitely want and I'm sure, steven, since you bought all the accessories, you bought the weight offload.

1:10:09 - Stephen Robles
Well, it comes with both straps. Oh, it comes with it. That's a bargain. Okay, that's a bargain.

1:10:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they discovered that for extended use you got to have the top strap Right For like off and on easy casual stuff they've got that nice padded back strap. But I think they've discovered that you got to have the actual proper strap if you want to use this for any length of time. But we don't again, we don't know and nobody's really outside of Apple used it for more than 30 minutes, so we'll see. The other thing, by the way, that I'm skeptical about, based on my 30 minutes with it back in June, is the viability of that screen in terms of text. Like they were.

Like oh, look at how good the text is in Safari and you're scrolling web pages and I'm like I don't know. I mean, if you do the math of the two screens and the size of these windows and the space that you're in and of that's being covered by those two screens, it's not like retina text, it's kind of it's kind of grainy, and so I think there's a real question of this whole productivity thing is about putting windows everywhere and being able to use them. But like is it? You know, are you really going to do that or is that going to make your head hurt because the text isn't clear enough. I don't know.

1:11:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm also still concerned about the fundamental issue of you are your eyes. You're asking your eyes to focus on an object that is too inch like an inch or two away from physically that is virtually several feet away and that this is a well documented problem where it causes eye strain. It causes a lot of people. It's just a no go.

1:11:37 - Leo Laporte
We are sickness. That's the box and apple and apple.

1:11:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I have neither apple, nor anybody I've talked to has indicated that. Oh, don't worry, we've thought we've made the breakthrough that solves this problem.

1:11:49 - Leo Laporte
Everybody says it's frame rate. It ain't frame rate. You're exactly right. It's a difference again. And you have two systems for determining distance. Walter Merch pointed this out years ago. You have two systems for that the eye convergence, and what was the other one I can't remember. And and focus basically the muscles were exactly.

1:12:08 - Andy Ihnatko
You have two. You have muscles that are basically pivoting your eyes in and out to target, to converge on the object. You also have muscles that are actually basically adjusting focus and your body if those don't match your body says oh, you ate something bad, you better throw it up.

1:12:24 - Leo Laporte
Now You're tripping balls, man and and, and that is something nobody is addressed. Everybody says, oh, frame rate will fix that they have a lot of hand waving. I'm not convinced. Us Air Force, when it was doing simulators, did a lot of testing. They said there's about 11% of the people who use these simulators will have VR sickness which could last as long as 24 hours. They said we don't let them drive cars after they use a simulator for another day.

And I think consumer product that makes somebody 11% of the public sick is doomed. If you ask me, go ahead, stephen. Say why we're wrong.

1:13:06 - Stephen Robles
No, no, no. I just want to challenge Jason to write a 5000 word piece on the virtual keyboard.

1:13:12 - Jason Snell
Dude no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's going to come on. He's going to come on the show.

1:13:17 - Leo Laporte
One eyeball will be pointing this way when I tell you I think I think text input is interesting.

1:13:22 - Jason Snell
I think that virtual keyboard is probably going to be terrible. It's one.

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
Somebody says one key at a time, right.

1:13:27 - Jason Snell
It doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, you're just doing this Basically it's a key and understanding they didn't show it to us, which is a it's a real sign. When they didn't show it to us, I think. I think our voice is going to be more important, right, like you're going to, you're going to opt to either use an external keyboard or you're going to use your voice to do some input. I think those are the most likely ways. Typing on in outer space is not going to be.

It's funny too, because the way they're doing it is very iPhone, like I don't know Again. I only use it for half an hour and they didn't let me do anything I wanted. I was going through their demo but, like I am struck by the fact that it's like an iPhone keyboard floating in space that you do this to. I was, I would think that you'd be better off. You know putting it, it can see your fingers right. I would think it would be better off typing on a like a virtual keyboard where it's basically mapping your finger location to a keyboard, but apparently, they didn't do that Because.

I I. You know I don't look at my keyboard when I type and I'm doing this, and could they figure that out? Maybe they tried it and they couldn't get it to work. But, like, doing this is not going to cut it.

1:14:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I saw. I saw a sample. I can't remember whether it was provided, but it must have been provided by Apple. But a sample of here is what a workspace might look like. And it wasn't just simply this person using the virtual keyboard, it was using the video pass through, so that they're using a physical keyboard, using a physical mouse, and they can use the video pass through to orient their fingers on the on the keyboard. Again, I don't know what, looking, trying to interact with real objects, even at super high frame rate 4k video. I don't know if that's again, if you've got a physical keyboard in front of you, you are not into. Oh, let me just dash off a few emails while I, before I, slay some orcs in 3D space. It's no, you have brought this to your hotel room or to your Amtrak seat, to your a table, someplace, to actually do productive work, and we're going to find out exactly what the what the productivity story is going to be on it A lot.

1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
a lot of these questions will be solved, of course, right after February 2nd, but the bigger question is going to take longer to solve, which is what is this for? You know, it took a while, it took a couple of years before the Apple Watch really figured out what it was for Some people. I've heard people say well, it needs a killer app. There is. We don't know what that might be at this point. Is it for entertainment, watching movies? Is it for productivity? Is it for playing games? What is this for?

And what are people, you know, getting the most value out of? I? I, as you know, I'm the skeptic in the bunch and it's actually career suicide for me not to buy one, because every you know, if you're a YouTuber, you bet damn well. Better buy one, right, steven? Because you're going to be, you're going to be surrounded by YouTubers going ah, wow, amazing. Or there'll be a whole bunch of people saying it was crap. I know it was going to be crap, but they'll all have one and they'll have all have the scary eye. Look on on their thumbnails and I'm sitting here saying I am going to stand by my original thought, which is it's not worth the money and I'm not going to buy it. Which?

1:16:27 - Stephen Robles
really leaves me out. It's going to be a lot like the original Apple watch, where it's going to take a year or two or to see what, what do people actually want this for? What do people find the most value? But I think two use cases, because I've been trying to think like what, what are the killer apps or whatever you know, when it gets cheaper and it might be accessible to things like schools? I remember when I was younger, planetarium experiences. I remember having those as a kid and it was like really affecting.

1:16:52 - Leo Laporte
Steven, no school is going to buy a device that of course one per kid.

1:16:57 - Stephen Robles
that has to fit when it's cheaper, you know, when it's cheaper and it's accessible.

1:17:01 - Leo Laporte
So my answer to this which everybody says, oh, but Leo, it's just the first, it's going to great, great, it's going to be important is it's like you're trying to sell me a car with square wheels. I'll wait until the round wheel version comes along. I'm not. I'm not convinced. So there's a lot of speculation Now. There's going to be a great platform someday. Okay, fine, when it is, I'll let you know. I don't think what we're seeing today is is a great platform, but I could be wrong. I'm willing to be wrong.

Unfortunately, I'm surrounded by people who are spending $3,500 to find out. Or you're getting $4,500.

1:17:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, this would this would be. This is going to be so fun to explore and to play with, but I think this is why the reviews are going to be kind of interesting, because I think that the best reviews are going to keep have to keep both ideas in mind that, okay, this is 1.0 of something. On the other hand, it is this isn't again. This isn't like Google Glass, where Google was explicitly. This is an experiment that we're playing with. We don't know if we have something here.

1:17:56 - Leo Laporte
It was why we're making this in limited quantities for it.

1:17:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, apple is saying, hey, come into our store and buy this completely ready $3,500 consumer device. It's like okay, that means that if the keyboard sucks, I have to say this keyboard totally sucks and the first and last paragraphs of the other review are going to have to be you just prayed to God that in a year Apple will find his car keys and figure out how to make this thing work. If they don't get it, if they don't get it, hit out of the bat out of the box.

1:18:26 - Leo Laporte
I think, I honestly think, that no sensible reviewer at this point will say oh, you need to buy this.

1:18:33 - Jason Snell
No, no, I mean there'll be some hype, but this is for people on the. I mean I could write the review now in some ways, right, because this is the best case scenario is this is promising and it's for people on the cutting edge and it might turn into something, but nobody's really sure what, and we don't like. You shouldn't feel any shame if you're not ready to step on board yet. Like I said, at least there will be reviews and you will get some idea from that. And then even then I mean in 1977, they put out personal computers and they cost a lot of money and they didn't do anything. And it was okay for almost every in the world to say I'll check back in in 10 years, like it's okay, it's okay.

1:19:14 - Leo Laporte
I want to take a little break. Let me take a little break and we'll come back and then hold your thoughts, steven and you're next, but I do want to take a little break here as you watch Mac Break Weekly Jason Snell, andy and Ako filling in for Alex Lenzi. This week, the great Steven Robles, the bearded teacher at beardcom.

1:19:33 - Stephen Robles
Beardfm FM, that's right.

1:19:35 - Jason Snell
Radio Beard. Radio Beard.

1:19:37 - Leo Laporte
And primary techfm. What's primary tech you didn't mention that last time.

1:19:42 - Stephen Robles
It's a new tech show that I launched with Jason A10. He's a technology writer at inkcom and so, yeah, new show, podcast, YouTube, all that.

1:19:51 - Leo Laporte
You've already scooped us on the Vision Pro, but you don't just do Mac stuff. I see you have an S24.

1:19:56 - Stephen Robles
You're talking about the rabbit. We're trying to expand our technology world. We did some Samsung Galaxy stuff, but still very Apple.

1:20:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's great to have you. Thank you, steven. I always love having you on the show. This is the part where I beg, say, please give us your money. You see how frugal I am being. I did not buy a Vision Pro. Well, okay, I'll admit Micah did, but we've actually told Micah you could buy it. How long does he have to return it? A week, a month, a year? Yeah, 30 days, 30 days. We told Micah buy it and return it in 30 days and you can do as many reviews as you want between now and then. Because, frankly, money's tight and we want to keep the lights on, we want to keep the shows going and, most importantly, we want to keep people like Micah employed. We've had to cut back quite a bit because advertising revenue is completely plummeted and you're seeing this across the board, not just podcasts, sports illustrated, just kind of basically fired everybody. I mean, this is a bad time for some reason for advertising. I think all the money's going to you, steven, it's all going to YouTube influencers, but I don't know.

I don't get any sponsorships, no, I just do adsense, okay there you go, all right, but actually doing it using Google and YouTube and so forth is probably a decent plan. Our plan is a little different. We really like the idea I'm from day one and wanted to do this, but the infrastructure wasn't there of having our audience support us. That's why we created ClubTWIT. We've tried to keep it affordable $7 a month. We've also tried to keep it desirable. So for $7 a month, you get ad-free versions of everything we do, including shows we don't put out in public. Like iOS today is now behind the pay wall, hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks All of that is on the Twit Plus Feed. Actually, they each have individual feeds. There's a Twit Plus Feed with content before and after the shows, and my favorite part of the membership is this great ClubTWIT Discord when you can join with our hosts, our producers, our guest hosts, and chat and talk about the things you care about, not just the shows, but everything. All of that for $7 a month. I think we give you pretty good value, but it makes such a difference to us. Your $7 a month means we can continue doing what we do and going forward. That's what it's going to take.

We're going to need to see some real growth in the Club. We're going to need to hear from you right now. It's less than 2% of the people listening to this show right now. Support us through the Club. I'd like to get that. It doesn't have to be all of you, and if you can't afford it, I understand. But if we can get that to 5%, we don't have to worry about advertising. So if you are not yet a member, please do me a favor.

Go to twittv Slash ClubTWIT. By the way, we're on the Twit page. Do the survey to twittv Slash Survey 24. There's only about a week left on the survey. We want to get everybody from every show who listens to every show responding, because we want to get a good representation, especially for you, mac break, weekly listeners and viewers. So twittv Slash Survey 24. Take the survey, just take a couple of minutes. That's one way you can support us. The other way, join the club. Twittv Slash Club Twit. We thank you for your support. All right, did you hold this thought? Did you put a pin in it, steven, or do we? Should we move on?

1:23:21 - Stephen Robles
No, no, just real quick. I'm curious what everybody's thought. I looked back when the Apple Watch launched. It was a new product category for Apple. The reviews from people like the Verge and everybody came out April 8th. Pre-orders were after that on April 10th and then the watch was available April 24th. So we had full on reviews two weeks before. Even you know you would have it in hand. All we have are some Instagram photos from influencers and like Al Roker wearing the Apple Vision Pro.

1:23:52 - Jason Snell
Taken by Apple.

1:23:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah by the way that's a good point. When Apple invited people in, they wouldn't let you take pictures yourself. And no, none of the pictures have the battery pack and for some reason, everybody's sitting down, which really worries me. I hope this isn't a sit down only experience.

1:24:09 - Stephen Robles
There was one guy standing up in like a matrix style coat in his photos he was just one guy doing that.

1:24:16 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I'm wearing the long coat, could I?

1:24:18 - Andy Ihnatko
stand up, please. You got to respect the coat.

1:24:21 - Stephen Robles
You got to respect the coat. Are we going to see early reviews of this thing before February 2nd, or is this just going to be kind of an Apple curated PR thing until then? Until the launch date.

1:24:33 - Leo Laporte
And isn't that a little suspicious when Apple doesn't let people see the reviews before they buy?

1:24:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I don't know, I think. I do think we're not going to see formal reviews and I think we're going to use two days before people actually start getting them, before people start actually going into the stores, which is par for the course, like, imagine, like Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest, because I think I mean Apple has to know that they don't have, that they can't make enough for if the worst thing would be if they had an immense amount of demand. It's kind of a blessing in disguise that, if all these supply chain issues are true, that they can only make about a half million a year, because that means that the only people that are going to be buying them are the people who are really super, super motivated to own one of these things.

1:25:24 - Leo Laporte
There's a confirming data point there. I expected to see massive ad campaign for this thing and the only ad I've seen so far is very, very low key. It's just a bunch of people wearing headsets, from Jordy in Star Trek to Obi-Wan Kenobi putting a headset on Luke Skywalker to Iron man. And then it says and the implication is, the future is coming, but it's not a hard sell on Vision Pro, it just, you know, briefly says Vision Pro Now, maybe Super Bowl Sunday there'll be something more, but this is on all the NFL playoffs. I thought I'd see a lot more. I think you're right, andy. I think that's Apple saying we don't need to sell this thing, we've already sold it out.

1:26:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Basically, yeah, again, we started the show talking about people who were so bedazzled by the Mac that, hey, I am willing to do incredibly complicated surgery to get a lot more storage into this thing. Those are the sort of people that are still buying Macs to this day. I think the first generation are both going to be on two sides of the spectrum People who are just either whether they're Apple people or not they are just really excited about the latest and greatest, that they don't. Their only expectations is to have an adventure, to have an experience with this. And the people who are like grisand, beaten down by life, like reporters and reviewers, who are like, but it does nothing, the goggles, they do nothing, you know. So it's going to be a year. Remember that, when I look when everybody who bought who has one, like in February, like Steven and Jason, like you can look forward to exactly like when I went through, when I had like one of the first e-bikes, like you become a unpaid brand ambassador hey, is that those bikes that has an electric motor? Like, yeah, it is like. What kind of range you get? Oh, usually about, you know, 20 to 30. Depends on how it's like. That's right, and I can still like quote like the spiel of every single question you get.

Because, just like with the first iPhone, which was not sophisticated enough to be competitive on a line item basis, it was not a competitive product with other smartphones of the day. It was completely unusable for a lot of people. Like if you were using a phone at enterprise, it was absolute no sale. However, for the first two years or three years I took to get to there, people who were not interested in buying it right now were around, people who were using it and who got those little demos and who, from ordinary human beings, were like oh yeah, no, I really do. The keyboard is not really that great. I really wish it has cut and copy paste. I kind of miss having an app store, but here's what I can do with media. Here's how much interesting it is to use with a camera, and so they're primed so that when it comes time for them to buy their next phone, maybe the next phone is going to be on their list.

Now, this is not totally applicable because it's not like oh gosh, I kind of like my, I kind of like my existing VR goggles, but I'm considering getting the Apple. No, it's, you have to sell people on the idea of you have to give them the memory of two years ago, when they're at your friend's house and you're playing beat saber or whatever the killer vision pro game is going to be, or the time when you actually you actually got a chance to like see what it was like to surf the web with this sort of thing and create your own sort of workspace with it. And at that point it will be hopefully like a $900 device with a good app store, with, just like with the Apple Watch, apple saying, okay turns out, we were completely wrong as to what this thing was for. We have adjusted our development of this thing to make it do the things that people are actually using it for, and at that point you'll get the people's $900 or $1,100.

1:28:58 - Stephen Robles
It's going to be harder too, because, like iPhone, apple Watch, someone asked like hey, what is that? Can I see it? They literally just look at it. Where the Apple vision, bro? Someone asked like hey, can I see that?

1:29:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't put this on you. You can't exactly.

1:29:12 - Leo Laporte
Let me see your inoculation card First secondly also you got your lenses, in it A whole bunch of topical things, although I guess you could pop those out pretty easily. And then it's. And then that's why you buy an extra $200 forehead piece, because let me put this guest forehead on.

1:29:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Everybody's going to know how to put into guest mode really quickly because that's going to be a thing.

1:29:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it does have a guest mode. Yeah, and, by the way, scooterx had a really good point. He said Tequila also makes a certain percentage of the people throw up. They still drink it. So I guess this is like Tequila for your eyes, that's not going to be a good slogan.

1:29:50 - Stephen Robles
I don't think the show title Title no title no title.

1:29:53 - Leo Laporte
I'll endorse that. Actually I was lobbying for Cook's Folly, but I know that that's insulting to people who've spent so much money.

1:29:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's, that's that's prejudging it.

1:30:02 - Leo Laporte
I have prejudged it. I have, I admit, totally biased against it Prejudged it. I've tried the other VR helmets and I've decided I don't need a nerd helmet and I don't think Apple is going to do anything that makes it better, except make it more expensive, which really doesn't help.

1:30:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's. It's kind of disappointing because we're seeing some more video from the from the rabbit AI handheld device and that's intriguing 200 bucks, Exactly, that's and that's and a lot of people saying, okay, oh my God, look at the latency of that. And oh my God, they still haven't said, they really haven't shown, how well it will interact with Spotify or with all my things it's, they still haven't really gone into it. However, the basic premise of the thing is that, oh, basically, instead of having, like, using multiple apps inside a phone as my interface to the entire world, I can just simply have a brief interaction with this little handheld device that's designed by Teenage Engineering and so there are a lot of, there are a lot of problems with it and a lot of things that have been decided, but a lot of people can immediately see, gee, that kind of would be. I kind of want to more see that as an app on my phone, but I kind of get how, at least with this first version, they're saying that well, what if you kept your phone in your pocket all the time or left it at home, because you just occasionally have to have a conversation with this thing? Whereas for the Vision Pro.

Like Stephen said, you have to. Someone has to figure out why they even want this sort of thing and they can't say games, because if they say games, they say, oh well, you know, this is this other game platform that's a third of the price and is already being really well supported by, and actually that does also play Netflix and YouTube and you can also have a virtual screen. In that. That's going to be Apple's hardest sell, which is, I keep saying that this could be the next iPhone, this could be the next Newton message pad, in that it gets people interested in the concept of this thing and aware of the concept of this thing, but then, as soon as Palm OS comes by, it comes by and say, yeah, how about?

If this cost a quarter of the amount, this could fit inside your pocket. Do you develop your own apps for it and you could actually use it and afford it? What if we throw out everything? That was a cool engineering demo but didn't actually make it more practical. That's what Apple could be facing. Hopefully they'll be the person who make that device, Just like the Mac basically made no point to having an Apple Lisa. They could create the Vision Teddy, Vision Steve, the Vision Gloria. I think it's more likely.

1:32:29 - Leo Laporte
It's the same thing for the Vision Pro, but Newton and I bought a bunch of Newtons it's more likely like the Newton than it is like, let's say, the iPod Hi-Fi.

1:32:38 - Jason Snell
I have been saying this for a while now which is, I think Apple started this project and that Apple believes that the biggest threat to the iPhone in the long term is a pair of actual glasses you can wear that have augmented reality overlaid on them, and the only way that you could make that product is by starting now, and that they want to be the ones who replace themselves if that comes to fruition. If it doesn't, if it's something else, so be it. Apple's got a lot of money and they are trying to protect their iPhone or build its replacement if they have to. So I do think and there have been some stories to this effect I do think that the long term end game for Apple is a pair of reasonably sized glasses that people can wear in public and that will have that whole. I mean, you can see it in the way they demo this now. They want you to use AR as much as possible. I think that that is their ultimate goal and Apple. They are so profitable, they are so flush with cash and that they can afford to make bets like that. There's a story we haven't even talked about yet about how apparently, apple has scaled back and changed its strategy with the car. But the car project is a similar thing where it's like Apple has and Google and Facebook, like they all have so much money that they can afford, to a certain degree, to place bets and, I think, the Vision Pro.

I don't think that there are many people at Apple who believe that the future is a big thing on your face that completely closes you off from the world and that maybe they can pipe some of the world back through. But the technology to do what they want isn't going to be ready for 5 or 10 or 15 years, it's just not. And they figure the way that they'll get there is by shipping this thing, learning how the software works, learning how people use it, pushing display technology forward and eventually getting where they want to go. And if that's true, then again what I've been saying all along today, which is there's no shame in you not using a 1.0 bit of hardware in a relatively new category, because maybe waiting 5 years is the right answer. Maybe even Apple fixed that.

1:34:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it does make you. That's an excellent point. It does make me wonder why they didn't decide to go in completely the opposite direction with the same thing. Because you can make a very there is display technology that can simply overlay into your peripheral vision under corner of your spectacles monochrome, high resolution, very, very readable, very, very presentable text, even color text, again through clear lenses, so that you are still seeing the world. You're just getting sort of like an Apple Watch experience of.

Oh, by the way, here is something that's happening that maybe you want to keep an eye on or I'm going to interact. You say that you want me to schedule something for you or you want to take a note. Here is my feedback to you on how well I'm helping you doing that undertaking. They could make that. That would be very, very possible. Google was kind enough to buy a company that was making really great eyeglass technology like that and then just use it for one demo at their developer conference last year, and now they seem to have buried it. But I wonder why this discussion was. No, let's make this really aggressive immersive virtual reality goggles that are going to where the first half hour of any conversation is going to be. There's no way I can be seen in public wearing this. Also, this is cutting me off from the entire world and I don't want this.

1:35:58 - Leo Laporte
It's you're kind of in their test lab. I think. 100% agree with you, Jason. That makes perfect sense and there was no way they could really develop this without releasing a product, even though it isn't anywhere near the final vision or the final product or anything most people would ever want. That's not the issue. You're basically 180,000 of you are agreeing to be guinea pigs, not guinea pigs. That's not a good beta testers for a product that is going to come out 10 years from now.

1:36:30 - Jason Snell
We didn't used to call it beta testing, but I think that's the right concept, is very early in a product cycle. You're going to get this and I think that's okay.

1:36:38 - Leo Laporte
I think what they want is okay, as long as everybody understands. That's what it is.

1:36:42 - Jason Snell
Well, right, and I think that reviews will say that you know for the most part, and that'll be a good thing. But I think what Apple wants to do, what they hope is even if they know that this is just the beginning and there's a long way for them to go what they want is for people to discover some good use cases in the meantime. This is a little like HoloLens being like you'll use it in businesses for CAD applications.

1:37:03 - Leo Laporte
The Microsoft has basically abandoned HoloLens. They have some very expensive. They went all in on it, they pushed it to the army, they pushed it to business and it's really. I think at this point you can say a flop, it's gone.

1:37:18 - Jason Snell
Right. So and Meta is sort of saying well, we're going to just keep trying with social, but in the meantime there's also games Apple actually met is saying in the meantime there's also AI and that's we're going to divert $10 billion a year from VR to AI, because it didn't happen.

But I would say for Apple again, think about the fact that Apple is always thinking, and they should always be thinking Absolutely what replaces the iPhone? Yep, and we and the great Steve Jobs way, be our own replacement, and I think they're worried that some sort of glass thing is. Ultimately, we don't need smartphones anymore because the display was right in front of us.

And if that is the case. But what they want in the meantime is for this to be useful in some way. Right, Like, you can't do 10 years of a product that nobody wants for anything. So the 3D movies and the maybe it's productivity and like the killer app for it may be not as killer as like good enough to give it some applications that make it have a little bit of an audience in order to keep it alive while they figure it out.

1:38:20 - Leo Laporte
Why are they not pushing gaming harder? Why are they pushing productivity in movies but not gaming so much? I mean, that's really been what VR has been all about, is it?

1:38:29 - Jason Snell
feels to me like it's an internal struggle at Apple because there will be games on it.

I wonder if who won that struggle of no, we're going to go out and call it spatial computing and say it's a computer and not do an option like controllers and things like that, because it would be, and maybe they felt like, look, metal already did that and they're not doing that great, so we need to take another step, stab at it. But clearly there were some real I don't want to say political, philosophical, I think arguments about what this product should be and having something holding. You know, holding in your hands a controller is something that they didn't want to do. Having the default experience be with a cameras on looking out at your actual space instead of in a virtual world. Somebody won that argument as well that they didn't want this to be a totally closed off kind of environment with games in it, so like. But they may be wrong. I mean, that's again we all have experienced this.

Who write and talk about Apple is that you criticize Apple sometimes and you're not hoping that somebody with an Apple who made a decision is going to be like you know, jason really convinced me.

What happens is that argument is already happening and then you, when you start to criticize Apple, the people who are making, who lost the argument, get to say, see, I told you so.

So I think you know what we we may see with Vision Pro in the next year or two is discovery that some of those philosophical arguments that they had over the last five years inside Apple the the I told you so is going to be customers reject your premise right and then they'll have to recalibrate. And I have great faith, I think, in Apple being smart enough to take that for a project, a product like this, and go with it of like, oh oh, we got that wrong because they did it. They actually did it with the Apple watch. So I think that that we're going to see a lot of that I hope we're going to see a lot of that in the next couple of years is is a repudiation of some of the assumptions that Apple makes. It's the kind of thing that only happens once you ship a product. You got to ship it Right and then we'll see.

1:40:23 - Stephen Robles
They got to throw the dice in the Apple newsroom article when they announced pre-orders after they talked about the UI and experiences. There's three sections of third party apps and other things and the order is productivity, entertainment and gaming, in that order in the newsroom press release. And the first third party apps that they mentioned is fantastic Cal and free space. First party Microsoft 365 and Slack, and like no shade to any of those apps. Slack in VR is not the killer app, nor is your calendar.

1:40:57 - Leo Laporte
Why would you put on a helmet to look at your?

1:40:59 - Jason Snell
calendar. I think the idea is that if you can find a compelling, probably a collaboration environment, like using free form or something where you're working with somebody or you're doing something, if and that's a big if right you could do something like that, then having your calendar off to the side and your Slack off to the side would be helpful because you don't have to mode switch.

But it's not the, but it's not the center right, it's the peripheral. I wonder if we'll start talking about apps and your peripheral vision, because that's kind of what we're talking about here, so you look over and then you look back at what you're working on. I think that's but, stephen. The funny thing is, games is third, but, like in June at WWC, games was whatever last is right. Like they showed one game in their demo and it was an iPad game running in a window. So they have actually they're talking more about games than they did in June. It's still not a lot but it's more.

1:41:49 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, stephen's being generous, because if you go through this press release, as you said, and I've gone through every 3D movies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, immersive entertainment experiences, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Alicia Keys rehearsal room, and then the last thing, it's almost a footnote, even more on the App Store and Apple Arcade, and even then they're showing you how you can walk around with dinosaurs. And there's no, there's no picture of a game at all.

1:42:16 - Stephen Robles
There's one, there's one more, the newsroom article before that. That was the entertainment release, specifically the one that announced the pre-orders. The only games it mentions is NBA 2K24, Sonic, dream Team, what the Golf and Super Fruit Ninja.

1:42:32 - Leo Laporte
These are basically mobile games, right? These are not.

1:42:35 - Jason Snell
It feels very, feels very. Ipad launch too, where it's like they've got their preferred partners. But I mean, as far as I can tell that, super Fruit Ninja, that is a hand tracking VR game. What the Golf? Although that was an iPad and iPhone game, that company has done a VR game on the MetaQuest, so they seem to be adapting their golf game for a VR or AR experience on. I mean, some of those are real VR or AR experiences that are made for Vision Pro. But again, they listed four. Those may be the four.

1:43:08 - Stephen Robles
And your point, leo. None of those games are shown in this press release. In the screenshots or videos they show the App Store scrolling by, but you don't see any screenshots of the actual games.

1:43:18 - Leo Laporte
Again, it's almost a footnote New gaming experiences. You know it's practically a footnote to the whole thing.

1:43:24 - Jason Snell
That's up from zero. So it's a little sign we should mention games other than showing, I think, nba being played on an iPad window, like yeah, I guess.

1:43:33 - Leo Laporte
So I think you know I'm going to recontextualize my snotty-ness Because I think you're right on, jason I think you nailed it which is this is something they have to do to get to where they want to be. It's not for me. I'm not going to buy it, I don't need to buy it, I'm not going to get all excited about it, and for those of you it'll be half a million by the end of the year who do buy it, it'll be your chance to kind of shape what it eventually becomes. The problem, I see, is that a lot of the technologies to make this be something as like your spectacles don't exist. The battery technologies yeah, I have a.

My new car has a heads up display, which I really, really like. It shows the speed, I could see the road and I, even when I'm looking at my songs, I can see my playlist and I can scroll through it on a thumb wheel on the. So there are, you know, that's a very cool use of that. I can still see the road, I'm still driving, but it is a little window that shows me some stuff instead of looking down at a screen to my right. That technology exists, but, to put it in your spectacles, we've got a ways to go, and yeah maybe it's more hardware thing than anything.

Else.

1:44:40 - Jason Snell
German did a story where he basically said there was a design group at we talked about this, a design group at Apple that was really devoted to the glasses idea, and what lost them. The argument in the end was not the philosophy of it, it was that that tech wasn't going to be ready to ship for years and years. And somebody said look, we have all these people working on this operating system and working on these products. We can't not ship for seven years, hoping that there's new cutting edge hardware in the meantime. Plus, when you ship it, you're also like, you're also driving the market right, like the, the shipment of vision pro. We talk about those Sony screens that are in there and how they're a limited quantity. Well, the, the active shipping vision pro, is going to create high quality screens at a volume. We for AR and VR that we've never seen before, because there's money to be made and there, but you can't do it unless you ship it.

1:45:33 - Leo Laporte
So you said that Apple's dialing back the car of and this is from Mark German today In Bloomberg has to. You know, I and I don't know how much this room is based as we started after board meetings. German says the car has been downgraded to level two plus autonomy, which is basically what we've got now. This is nothing. That's a win.

1:45:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's a win, Cause reality, reality has set in in the Apple car project, cause they were all like it's a little like the saying, oh, why don't we just do glasses? And somebody saying, dude, we can't do glasses for 15 years, let's ship a product. This is that where they're like, oh, we'll design it with with with benches facing each other and there won't be a steering wheel and it'll drive itself. And at some point and they somebody reported that credulously like a year ago and like, dude, no car in the next five years is going to ship without, or 10 years, or 15 years probably, is going to ship without a steering wheel. You need to put, you need to make a car, make a make a Tesla-esque car.

1:46:33 - Stephen Robles
Well, interestingly.

1:46:34 - Jason Snell
And they seem to have gotten the message that they can't.

1:46:36 - Leo Laporte
Elon is, of course, the hype master promoting basically level four. But I think Apple's smart. They're saying, well, it's going to be kind of between level two and three, which means drive the vehicle under limited circumstances. Again, my new car will do that. Traffic jam chauffeur, my new car will do that. That's level three. So they're saying we're, we're, you know, we're not even going to be level three, we're going to have steering and brake, acceleration support, lane centering and adaptive cruise control and in a sense, every car coming out today has these features, level two features.

1:47:09 - Jason Snell
And also the other thing Maybe upgrades down the road.

1:47:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're smart to say no. Well, you know, this is, this is the target anyway. And, by the way, 2028, 2028. 2028. Four years from now, even that speculative.

1:47:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean people we're. The state of the art right now is that if you have a small area of a city that's intensely well mapped out specifically, then you can have a car that, if it is being supported by lots of humans at a data center remotely who is always taking a look at what it's doing, it will sometimes still screw up.

1:47:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but this is not-. But not be good enough for I mean, this is this is not what they're talking about. They have, they have left that behind now and they're saying no, we're not, we're going to drive you. That's why I'm saying that 2028.

1:47:58 - Andy Ihnatko
So I'm saying that's the feature, or the features that people actually want, which is help me to get from this street onto the highway.

1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
And I have to say I drove here my mother didn't Go ahead your mother Quickly.

1:48:08 - Andy Ihnatko
My mother didn't never drove, would not drive, would always need a ride if she needed to go on the highway, because she was just terrified of that merge onto the highway. If you could just simply say okay, I'm lined up, get me into the highway and then also, now that I'm on the highway, take a takeover. I'll have my hands on the wheel, but take over until it's time for me, until you take me safely off the exit, and that's the stuff that's actually useful. I mean, the only reason why this has got so much investment so early on is that for the reason why a lot of technology always gets an amazing amount of investment despite the fact that it's a moonshot. Any technology that gives an industry the ability to fire a lot of people will always get an enormous amount of investment to see if they can make that happen.

And humanoid robots as a really, really hot sector right now. So many different companies are trying to create a leasable workforce because, again, we don't know if this is actually going to be useful. We don't know if they can actually do things that are even more less expensive or more productive than an actual human, but the ability to simply lease your workforce the way that you used to be able to lease your computers in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. That's a lot of people. You get to fire, a lot of money that hopefully you get to save. It is enticing. It is intoxicating for an industry.

1:49:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, 2028 for a car, that is essentially the same thing you would get today.

1:49:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I do wonder, though. I mean it's Apple, right? So they're going to find an angle there, and it may be more features than people are used to, while not claiming full autonomy, and that's fine, right. I think there are ways to do features that help you as a driver, and they will build an interface in this like a Like a nice car.

hell yeah they could make a nice car. They certainly could make a nice car. And it's funny because reading this story I was like, oh well, it might happen now, because before this it's been so pie in the sky that it's not realistic and, according to Gerrman, they had a real tough back and forth with Cook and the board and the people who are running that who I think they basically were, said what could you ship in four years?

What could you ship? Because otherwise you're going to end up like if they had just tried to keep making glasses instead of doing the Vision Pro, which is like we can't keep spending all of this money with no product on the horizon. There has to be a product here somewhere. And then you iterate, right. So it sounds like I had that moment where I thought, you know, I didn't like getting up at 5 am to spend $5,000 or $4,000 on a Vision Pro and then in four years you're going to make a car. Oh boy, right. But it feels a little more real because it's a more realistic goal. It's a product that people actually make now, instead of this fantasy product with no steering wheel.

1:50:52 - Andy Ihnatko
And I do think part of that conversation was apps. Apple makes a huge amount of money on apps. The Vision Pro seems to be more instinctively a platform for selling apps and taking 3% out of every dollar that's spent in the app store than glasses, where it's essentially an excess. It feels like a sophisticated way to get alerts and simple interactions between an app you've already purchased on your phone. I have to believe that that was part of the discussion as well.

1:51:21 - Leo Laporte
I should also point out that all the EV manufacturers, including Ford, are sucking wind right now because Elon has dropped the prices of Teslas so low that they can't sell their EVs. Tesla owns this market, so this is a tough market right now for Apple to enter. It's a very low margin business, I would say.

1:51:43 - Jason Snell
Well, you know, I mean Tesla's doing okay. Right, I think the Model Y was the best selling car last year, but the truth is like if you look at where Apple might play, it's not the Model Y and the. Model 3. It's like the Model S or the Lucid Air, and there was a story about how Lucid like sold 6,000 cars last year, or something like a ridiculously small number. So that's the danger that Apple has, is Apple's instinct is going to be to make a $100,000 car.

1:52:11 - Leo Laporte
Kerman's even saying 100,000. That's fine.

1:52:14 - Jason Snell
That's a tough sell. That's going to be a tough sell.

1:52:16 - Leo Laporte
It's out of my range. Yeah, yeah, same by a lot.

1:52:21 - Jason Snell
By a lot. I won't be pre-ordering that at 5 AM Let me tell you I'm out of that pre-order. You're not going to max out on the storage.

1:52:33 - Leo Laporte
Other stories. Apple's timing, by the way, very bad. Daring fireball. John Gruber says it's like the sixth finger in an AI rendered hand. He's talking about Apple's announcement that, okay, sure, supreme Court, we'll open up our app store so that people can refer to other places. We're still going to take a 27% commission on all sales.

And he says Apple's damaging their brand and their reputation with this policy. It is probably one of the reasons. Netflix, youtube and Spotify, you know, I mean, this just is a piling on now at this point. And they said yeah, see, we hate these guys too. They have to do it. The Supreme Court has declined to review the lower court decision that Apple has to allow apps to say you have an Amazon, you're reading a book in the Kindle app on the iPhone Right now. When I say I want to buy this book, it says you can't buy it because Apple won't let them say where you can buy it. Now we'll have a link to an Amazon store where you can buy that book. But Apple says but we still want our 27%, 3% off because you're doing the credit card, not us.

1:53:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's pretty horrifying. It really is a middle finger. I say, okay, we will give you the absolute minimum compliance with a court order that we have fought all the way to the.

1:54:03 - Leo Laporte
Not just minimum malicious compliance. I think.

1:54:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, it's like. It's not just that, but you will have to spend. Give us 27% instead of 30%. You are going to have to give us an accounting every single month, no more than 15 days after the start of the month, of every single app sale that you made. You have to apply to us for this ability. We may even reject you. We are going to pass and fail, depending on whether we think that you're going to be harmful or not. You also have to put in a warning, and here is an example, a boilerplate that you can use to make sure that you're not going to.

We're not going to ding you on this. That has in big, bold letters your phone will turn into a bat, latch onto your throat and kill you if you leave this app to buy something someplace else. On and on and on and on. It really is disgusting and it's petty, it's spiteful. It is the kid who's been told look, you are going to school today and saying I'm going to go to school, but you're going to drag me to school covered with my own spit and tears and vomit and I'm going to punch you and kick you and bite you every inch of the way to school, as opposed to saying, look, you lost. You never had a point. Apple never had a viable argument to this begin with.

The ruling is not saying that Apple has to allow side loading of apps. It just has to allow companies to say oh, by the way, inside the app, you can go to our site to sign up for this subscription or to buy this book. The fact that that was illegal and that violated App Store policies for so long shows you that Apple has. You know, you hear about these people, especially these celebrities that are the best people in the world until they drink and then they turn into the worst people you've ever heard of in your life. App Store. Is Apple drunk? That is like they're the least like Apple they ever are when it has anything to do with running the app store. It's terrible, it's embarrassing and Apple should grow up.

1:56:01 - Jason Snell
It does feel spiteful, like a little kid being told okay, you can't do this, and then they do everything but that.

1:56:07 - Stephen Robles
Yeah.

1:56:08 - Jason Snell
And they step right up to the line and it's just compliance, it is.

Look, I get their plan dangerous game here, right, because it is when you say, okay, we'll comply with the letter of the law, but no further, and it's not going to be any benefit to everyone. They're basically daring the regulators to step over that line, and I do think that there are people with an Apple who think it is one thing to say you have to put this in your interface and it's another thing to mandate that Apple not charge money for access to its platform. Right, because that is going a little deeper into a company, and I think that they're like how does that work? And they think that they've got other moves they could make. They could maybe say okay, well, if you don't do this, then there's going to be an alternative minimum tax that's based on the size of your company to have access to our developer tools. There are lots of levels that they could continue to play here.

The danger is that they are inviting angry regulators to go deeper and deeper into their business instead of like because, look, the bottom line is this thing, even without the bookkeeping external tax that's still being levied is behind a scare dialogue and it's inconvenient. So I would argue that you would have to. I mean even if Apple took no tax from people outside the store, they would still do okay, because if the mandate is, you still have to offer an app purchase. Most people are going to do the app purchase. It's just so much easier. But it does mean that Apple might lose some money to external sales, especially if they do big discounts on the outside.

Still, that's going to happen. Honestly, that's going to happen anyway, because if you only have to track them for seven days, it's going to be really easy to get somebody to pay for a month, get on their mailing list, not recharge them, and then email them after eight days and say, hey, I can give you a deal. Right, it's still going to happen. But they look so like, just like little kids having a tantrum. And the danger and this is what we've been all saying all along the danger is you are daring the law, the regulators, the lawmakers to come further into your business and interfere with it. At some point you need to say you know what. We're just a whistle past the graveyard here and Apple has not reached that point yet. It's a dare. We dare you to tell us that we can't charge people for access to our platform, and that's a dangerous dare.

1:58:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, what really gets me and this is why I'm really hard line about Apple having absolutely no right to absolutely no defense for this is that I absolutely understand. Hello, sorry, I'm getting notices that my default microphone has changed. Okay, can you hear me now? Yeah, yes, I'm sorry, I'm not alert. There was anyway.

Now I can respect the argument that Apple should not be letting software developers avoid the Apple tax. When they create an app that relies on Apple's APIs, they're relying on Apple's storefront, they're relying on Apple's marketing, they're relying on Apple's development tools. We can argue about the idea that Apple doesn't allow them to do anything else other than that Apple has in some way materially contributed to the development of this app, the creation of this app. It's when they say that oh, that digital copy of Amazing Spider-Man this week that came out in Comixology. Yeah, we want 30% of that too.

But you didn't create it, I know, but you had nothing to do with marketing. That's not your customer, it's my customer. Oh, I know that too. You also had nothing to do with selling it, because now, oh, I know that either. I just want 30% of this comic book, even though, of course, there's not already 30% of overhead in the purchase price of this. You just pass it on to your customers, that'll work fine. That's like oh, this is why I just go to hell. Apple Again, you're drunk. Go home, come back with a Vision Pro. Okay, I want the nice Apple back again.

2:00:09 - Leo Laporte
Here's the warning you get when you click on an app and go to the outside place.

2:00:15 - Jason Snell
Danger, danger, you're about to go to an external website.

2:00:18 - Leo Laporte
Apple's not responsible for the privacy or security of purchase as a man on the web, et cetera, et cetera. It's just Apple can't verify any pricing or promotions. They might as well put the continue button in black on black typeface. Jamie Zewinski Corey Doctorow brought this to my attention on Sunday on Twitter has collected a few of these. What did Corey talk? Call them these fences? This one's from the original browser, the Mozilla browser. What was it? It was a NCSA's browser. Beware, despite our most strenuous intentions in the contrary, absolutely anything could be on the other end of this hyperlink, including quite possibly pornography or even nudity, or you're about to leave. Myspacecom Was it something we did.

It's just amazing that Apple and in this day and age now, of course, alex Lindsey, was on Twitter on Sunday. If you want to, alex isn't here today to argue the opposite, but if you want to hear his arguments, he was very good on Sunday explaining why he thought Apple was right not to offer this external link. Maybe not the ideal situation for users. Honestly, I don't know why Apple makes the iPhone so different from the Mac, and I do hope the Mac doesn't become like the iPhone Right now. Of course, in the Mac you can quote side load. We used to call it downloading apps. Side load Any application you want from anywhere you want. We still call it that on the Mac.

2:01:51 - Jason Snell
I don't think they're ever going to change. On the Mac They've had plenty of opportunities, Thank God.

2:01:54 - Leo Laporte
I hope they don't. These other platforms and there are.

2:01:57 - Jason Snell
I mean, alex is absolutely right, there are valid arguments here, but I think that's why I'm making me not only doesn't make me feel kind of put off, like Andy said, but also I think I want to make that business argument that they are really playing with fire here by doing this and why? What's the benefit? I get that there's money to be made here and you've been making money, but I think there were other ways to play this that are not rolling your eyes and kicking the dirt and acting like a baby.

2:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Maybe they've deluded themselves to the point where they really believe it, that like oh, this is a terrible thing for you.

2:02:31 - Jason Snell
Corporate culture is so strong and Steve Jobs I mean I say every time where it's like, where's my money? We're going to get our money one way or another. That's Steve, that came from Steve and he made sure he set up Apple University. He set up the entire corporate culture at Apple. It's hard to kill corporate culture once it's ingrained. He built that and Steve and I've said this before but, like Steve, never forgave Pat McGovern, the guy who founded IDG, for doing Macworld and making a business that was successful Macworld Magazine, macworld Expo because Steve felt like the word Mac and all the greatness of the Mac was from him and his largesse and Apple's largesse, and how dare somebody else make a business based on it without kicking them in for a share? That was always Steve's attitude.

2:03:19 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of mafia mentality.

2:03:21 - Jason Snell
It was his attitude when he left Apple. It was his attitude when he came back. It is he wants his money, I mean, and Steve really did believe that Apple was the source and he was the source of all that was good and profitable and that everybody else was just kind of a parasite.

2:03:36 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the reasons we didn't want to call it podcasts. I didn't want to call it podcasts for years because they actually did sue. Some companies had the word pod in their name and I was worried that Apple might do the same to us.

2:03:48 - Jason Snell
So that my point is Steve is long gone now, but his culture lives on, and this is one of those cases where I think you end up as a very rich company. You have more to lose than to gain by behaving like this. But when Steve came back, they were a death store. They had more, maybe more to gain than to lose by encouraging this kind of mindset. But that day passed a long time ago and yet we're still here. So I just they need to. I say they need to change their attitude and change their culture. But I think the truth is, as somebody who spent a long time trying to change a print magazine culture to think about the internet. It is I want. I once did a presentation where I literally put up a slide about corporate culture and it was just a picture of Godzilla. I'm like you can't beat it. Oh, I know.

And Apple is struggling with that now.

2:04:39 - Leo Laporte
You and I are so glad we don't work for big companies Corporate yeah, I mean.

2:04:42 - Jason Snell
It's just they could be powerfully positive, like good corporate culture. The reason corporate cultures exist is to keep the thing running and doing what it needs to do. The downside is, if you need to change, good luck Very hard, it's not going to happen.

2:04:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't think anybody who's not worked in a big company at a higher level, where you dealt with that, really understands that. But you're absolutely right. I saw it at CDTV, I saw it at Zip Davis, I saw it in the site. Have you turned on your stolen iPhone protection? Ios 17 came out. 17.3 came out yesterday, as did Mac OS 14.3. I'm going to guess there are significant security fixes in here. It just feels like that. So you might want to do those updates.

But this new, the biggest new feature in 17.3, is stolen device protection. Now you turn it on by going into your settings face ID and passcode. You have to enter your passcode. Don't look, I'm not going to show you my passcode. I touched somebody who still has a four digit passcode. I thought what You're crazy. And if you scroll down way, way down, you'll see stolen device protection. Oh, I just turned it off. Let me turn it back on again. This ads says Apple another layer of security when iPhone is away from familiar locations such as home and work. By the way, how does Apple know what home and work is?

2:06:04 - Stephen Robles
So that was actually one of my things when I turned it on. So if it's that one of your it's called significant locations, it will allow you to turn.

2:06:14 - Leo Laporte
Is Apple tracking my location? How does it know what's on the work?

2:06:18 - Stephen Robles
If you go to settings, privacy and security, go to location services. Scroll all the way down to system services. There is a significant locations screen. This is actually what mine looks like and for some reason it has a public. Here is one of my significant locations which raised the flag.

2:06:37 - Leo Laporte
He must have been a long time shopping.

2:06:40 - Stephen Robles
There's 197 records in this significant location place but I can't access them, like I can't see what the locations are that it thinks is significant, because I might want to remove some of those significant locations, especially a supermarket, and would like to add some manually, like my home address and maybe my mom's house, and so I would be. I would like some more granularity into, like, what significant locations is it seeing. Can I, you know, see what's there? But because then you can disable this.

2:07:09 - Leo Laporte
This is historical. It does think my home is significant, but it also thinks Noah's bagels is significant. That is bizarre, actually. Oh, it's Safeway. Just like you, it's a grocery store.

2:07:23 - Stephen Robles
The grocery.

2:07:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, strange it's not my number one grocery store by name. That's weird, I didn't even know this thing was here. It says it has 171 records over the last 23 days, so that's so. By the way, if you, if you are one of those people say, oh my God, google knows everywhere, you know, who else knows everywhere. You are Apple, you could turn it off, you know, but I've never even seen that setting. That is way buried deep in system services under location.

2:07:54 - Stephen Robles
And the big difference is probably, this is on device.

2:07:56 - Leo Laporte
You know, I don't think this is look, I trust Apple and, honestly, a lot of these things are valuable, in this case, the stolen phone protection, right, but just want to point out first party data collection is real. And when Apple says, oh, you know, you don't want this app to track you, they're tracking you. Just remember that, that's all. They're all tracking you. Anyway, is this going to sell? Is this going to?

2:08:27 - Jason Snell
track you on the device and it doesn't go anywhere. It's not the same and you can't make a parallel.

2:08:33 - Leo Laporte
We're sure that it's not going off device.

2:08:35 - Jason Snell
That's what this is. It's the same with the journaling app right, you do like that you know. Apple's apps often are worse because they don't share that information and and amalgamated, they just keep it on the device, and that's the case here and again. The idea here is if you're, in a weird place and somebody steals your phone it's not a, and maybe the grocery store is not as bagels, though. It's right.

2:08:58 - Stephen Robles
Then they can do stuff to it, but they're closing a big screen Significant locations are into an encrypted and cannot be read by Apple. Awesome, that's like an old fine print. That's good. That's good.

2:09:09 - Leo Laporte
All right. So in fact that's a perfect use of that. That. The phone should know everywhere I go and of course, law enforcement when they get my phone or Pegasus, you know, or you know when my phone is cracked. All that stuff will be there. But you know, that's the price we pay for having a phone, I guess.

2:09:27 - Andy Ihnatko
And there's also just the basic, basic common sense of hey look, I would. I don't care if my phone is unlocked, if someone tries to change my Apple ID password, ask to verify who I am. I don't care if I just unlocked this 30 seconds ago. Ask to verify. That's good and it's using.

2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
Face ID or Touch ID, which we know is highly secure. It puts it if you do really serious things like change your Apple ID password or your device passcode, there's like a time delay on it, right? What is it? A day, One hour, One hour. So that's to keep some, and this is all I think in response to Joanne Astern's article in the Wall Street Journal about people I don't know shoulder surfing you and getting your code and then taking your phone, or getting your phone when it's unlocked and like keeping it unlocked and then accessing everything in there, Because, as we just pointed out, everything is in there.

2:10:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Basically, basically locking you out of Apple ID so that you can't remote lock it, you can't remote destroy it.

2:10:21 - Leo Laporte
So this is a direct response to that and I think it's a good idea I turn it on.

2:10:24 - Stephen Robles
I don't see any reason not to no. Yeah, I turn it on, like iCloud passwords too. So if you try to get into your iCloud passwords with stolen device protection on, it won't ever fall back to your phone passcode to unlock. It'll just say Face ID is required. Will not unlock without it. So they can't get your banking login. You know your square cash, venmo, all that kind of stuff.

2:10:45 - Leo Laporte
So turn it on Download 17.3. Download 14.3. I think it's really. I think these are mostly security updates.

2:10:55 - Stephen Robles
They're not as Unfortunately, that stolen device protection is not on iPad. It's only on the iPad. No, you can't. It's not on the iPad, which is strange.

2:11:04 - Leo Laporte
If you look at the fixes, by the way, in the security page that they're shipping, it's a long list. It's a long list. I think you definitely want to download this. There's a lot of things that are being patched in 14.3. Same with 17.3.

2:11:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think there was a new Zero Day that Google found. I think that patches that as well. So, yeah, there's a lot of good reasons to update.

2:11:33 - Leo Laporte
Apple is now going to pay higher royalties to people who mix their music spatially, even if you don't play it in spatial audio.

2:11:43 - Jason Snell
I mean more music for artists is good, More money for artists what they're doing. Yeah, I mean, sorry, more money for artists. And if it is sort of like the carrot is the money and the stick is spatial audio mix, please, I don't know. I mean until somebody writes an article that says, no, the amount of money that it costs to do a spatial audio mix is far more than they'll get. I mean, in general, I'm looking at this like oh, somebody wants to pay artists more money for streaming media. Love it Good. Let's do that, let's do it, let's do it.

I am not. Apple wants to see the benefit in having streaming or having spatial audio mixes out there and it's fine. I think they're fun. I listen to them from time to time, from time.

2:12:23 - Leo Laporte
That's my point. At first we were saying, oh, it's like going from mono to stereo and Apple really pushed that.

2:12:28 - Jason Snell
I don't yeah, it doesn't. It depends on the mix too. I mean even with monitor to stereo. Remember those early Beatles stereo mixes were 100% panned one way or another. Like I'd say, a lot of spatial audio mixes these days are kind of subtle and that's good in one way, but it also makes it less of a night and day kind of difference. Like I've got some old 5.1 albums that were released on DVD and those are like those Beatles albums. They're like the vocals are here, the horns are here, the guitar is showing off.

And the modern Dolby Atmos mixes are a lot generally I mean not all of them, but are generally more subtle than that and that's good artistically. But it's bad for Apple trying to sell it.

2:13:08 - Leo Laporte
We were talking about our favorite my favorite anyway album these days Peter Gabriel's new IO, which has three mixes. It has a bright side, dark side, dark side and then inside, which is his Dolby Atmos mix. I can't tell the difference.

2:13:25 - Jason Snell
I actually listened to that inside Mix again the other day and I can tell.

but again, it's subtle, it's one of those things where there are moments where the drums are coming from behind and I had that moment of like oh, that's pretty good, right, but it's subtle and that's again I think Apple sees there's a benefit here for AirPods. It's one of those places where, like, how do we get any leverage if we're Apple, over something that's a commodity, because Spotify does the same thing and Amazon does the same thing, and I think this is one of them where they're like we got the hardware, we've got the service. We can roll this spatial audio into all of our products wherever we can and then make claims about it being a better experience, and that gives us a little bit up on Spotify.

2:14:09 - Leo Laporte
So okay, so I played the inside Mix on. I mean I don't, I guess I should listen to it on my AirPods Pros or Pro Max, but I played it on my speakers, my Apple speakers, and yeah, it sounded good. I kind of like the bright side Mix. So, anyway, good, more money to the artist. You're exactly right, that's what matters. All right, I know there's a lot of stuff we spent so much time talking about, but I think I got the major, the major things right. Oh, you get a new WatchOS 10.3 with a new Unity Bloom Apple Watch face. There are new wallpapers, also for the iPhone, to celebrate Black History Month.

2:14:54 - Stephen Robles
The other big feature was a collaborative playlist in Apple Music.

2:14:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I saw that, but I don't know anybody who I would do that with. Do you do that with anyone?

2:15:03 - Stephen Robles
Well, so in my YouTube video I actually showed the QR code and left it open to see who can join, and so I hit the Max Max collaborators on a playlist is 100 people, and so I got 100 people in this Apple Music playlist. Oh, like over 9000 songs.

2:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a great idea. Didn't you do that, andy? In the very early days of Apple Music, you had a playlist. You had people do right.

2:15:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I just asked people to recommend one and only one song. Don't explain why, don't explain how, but it has to be only one song. That was so cool. Yeah, that was fun.

2:15:36 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, I wish I could have limited it, because there were a couple of people that kind of spanned the list and added like a thousand songs just themselves. Because it totally opened like they added yeah, it should be one song, yeah, so where do I do this Show?

2:15:47 - Leo Laporte
me Steven, walk me through this bearded teacher, I have my. I'm in Apple Music. Go to playlists.

2:15:54 - Stephen Robles
Go to playlists. I don't even know where that is. This has to be a playlist that, like, you created, not like an Apple Music playlist. Where's Playlists, I don't know? Go to your library tab in the bottom right.

2:16:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm such an old man. Oh, here we go. Playlists Yep, okay.

2:16:06 - Stephen Robles
You can do one of your current playlists. It doesn't have to be no, no, I should do my funeral playlist.

2:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Actually, that'd be good. Okay, so I'm going to do shared, create that and a picture of me. Let's take a photo, because that makes it so much more real. All right, there we go. That's it. Okay, now we got an album cover. Now I create it, right.

2:16:27 - Stephen Robles
Create a playlist. Okay, and then in the upper right hand, corner.

2:16:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, collaborate yeah.

2:16:32 - Stephen Robles
Person icon.

2:16:34 - Leo Laporte
I can approve them or not. Start collaborating.

2:16:38 - Stephen Robles
If you don't approve it, then you can put the link or QR code and anyone can join without you having to manually do it. So I left that off.

2:16:46 - Leo Laporte
Where's the QR code? Is it?

2:16:48 - Stephen Robles
Once you start collaboration, then you can hit the little community thing and the QR code.

2:16:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there it is Okay. There it is, everybody. Go ahead. Do me a favor, though, you know, don't spam it. Put your favorite song. Let's do what Andy did Put one song. You don't have to explain it, just put your favorite song in there, the song I should be listening to to really enjoy spatial audio to its fullest. So we'll see what happens. Stephen, you got how many songs?

2:17:17 - Stephen Robles
100 people maximum. That's the stop. After that I wouldn't let many more people in.

2:17:22 - Leo Laporte
And you got how many songs in there.

2:17:24 - Stephen Robles
Oh, there's like 9,500 or something.

2:17:27 - Leo Laporte
Patrick and Bill and others in there. Oh, there's Richard, there's Ricky, wow.

2:17:32 - Stephen Robles
I see my artist. And you can see emojis. You can actually react to other people's songs as you're listening. Oh nice, you can fart it, put a fire emoji, and so it's kind of cool to see other people react.

2:17:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh that's cool, can you see?

2:17:43 - Stephen Robles
that in the playlist.

2:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, quite a few. I must have worked, because I'm seeing quite a few people of it. And John Ashley, I don't know. I could send you the screenshot, but then, if I do, I bet you it'll be full before the end of the show.

2:17:56 - John Ashley
Well, if it's not full before the end of the show. I just need it for scientific purposes.

2:18:01 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to get it full before the end of the show. That means you're going to make it the thumbnail. We're trying to compete with you guys, you YouTubers, stephen, and doing the thumbnails.

2:18:11 - Stephen Robles
It is fun, though, because you can see, like in the playlist that I created, you see the person's photo next to the song that they actually added to the I like that yeah. And you see other people's emoji that they reacted.

2:18:23 - Leo Laporte
I think that's fun. I think our audience is is is is going to be adult enough. Yeah, I'm really asking for it, All right.

2:18:33 - Stephen Robles
There were some questionable song additions. I'm not going to lie.

2:18:37 - Leo Laporte
Grandma got run over by a reindeer. All right, I am. I am now sending this to our our producer, john Ashley, so he can put it somewhere. I don't know where he's going to put it, but it's. I've just sent it to you, john. All right, let's take a little, a little breaky wakey and a little breaky wakey heart, and we'll come back and get your picks of the week, ladies and gentlemen. Pick of the week time. That was a short break. It was a nice real refresh, a break. The refresh. Pick of the week time. Andy and Ako, you kick it off, will you?

2:19:17 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick is a really great app for the Mac that, after 15 years of development, is finally available for, like I was a long time development. My favorite crossword app for the Mac is is called black ink. It's made by Red Sweater software. Love it too. Yeah, the remarkable Daniel Joker Yep, yep, and it's. The blog post is really magnificent because he says that it's been in beta for like two presidential administrations. It's just that there are a lot of like little things that had to be wrapped up in order to ship it finally, and there are a lot of things that like had to take priority, like at Red Sweater, before that had to happen. But now it's fine. But now it's finally out and it really is just as good as experience on the Mac.

It's it's it's such a natural to be doing crossword puzzles on on the iPad and although obviously this is not nearly the first app for crossword puzzles on on the iPad, I think it's probably like the most Mac, the most like iOS, like the most iPad, like they're not just trying to do something super flashy and clever.

It is like no, I want to download a whole bunch of of crossword puzzles, I want to solve them, I want to work on them and I want to basically have this thing in front of my face on the commuter rail that tells people don't have a conversation with me. I'm clearly focused on other than human interaction. It's free, and so if you, it's free. If you, if you want to provide your own, your own crossword puzzles or use some of the basic ones that you can get from it for two bucks a month or 20 bucks a year, you also get access to all kinds of other features, including access to other puzzles, but you don't necessarily have to always get your puzzles through this app directly. Again, it'll connect to. There's actually a standard for digital crossword puzzles as compatible with them, so I didn't really get into crosswords that much until I started, like, using black ink on the Mac, because nobody can see when you erase and replace something if you're just typing in words from a keyboard, and that's something that really, really, really like.

2:21:10 - Leo Laporte
You like those smudges when you, when you race, and things like that.

2:21:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I like to be able to basically tell people that I just do it in ink first time and this one board it's only. It's only a it's only a Wednesday puzzle, so it kind of bored me, but hey, my bus was late, even though I was like Googling pretty much three out of every five different questions. I like the other two wrong. I like to support.

2:21:32 - Leo Laporte
Daniel, I bought black ink for the Mac and you can, by the way, hook it up to your New York Times account, because there really is only one good crossword puzzle and it's the New York Times crossword puzzles. So you, but if you prefer his interface, which I do, to the New York.

2:21:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Times, exactly, it's such a beautiful interface.

2:21:49 - Leo Laporte
Are there any other good crossword puzzles? Andy?

2:21:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I have to admit that there's the New York the. I'm not a puzzle snob. I basically occasionally do crosswords and yeah, it's the one where when you get the easy one on Monday, you have a really good time. When you get halfway through the Thursday one, even though you failed abjectly, you feel really good you got that far. And when you have better things to do on a weekend than even pretend you're able to solve a weekend Sunday times crossword puzzle, you still have a good time, with the frustration of it.

2:22:19 - Stephen Robles
Have you tried to Apple news ones? Apple news crosswords.

2:22:22 - Leo Laporte
No, they're terrible. You're not going to recommend those, are you?

2:22:27 - Stephen Robles
I don't know, I was just asking.

2:22:28 - Leo Laporte
I don't like them.

2:22:31 - Stephen Robles
So, here's the deal.

2:22:32 - Leo Laporte
The magazine crossword is pretty good.

Yeah, tv guide used to have a great crossword If you knew your TV shows instant Apple, apple's news crosswords are. You know they're not bad. The problem is you know really it's more. It's like there's a culture to each cross, like will shorts really makes the New York crossword puzzles a certain way and you kind of get to know the culture. It's easy on Monday and hard on Sunday and but there's also kind of a style and once you know that then it's fun to do those crossword puzzles. I didn't. I didn't. Apple made theirs, I think, a little too easy in my opinion.

2:23:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and especially the really well crafted ones, where you realize like a third of the way in that, oh any, any of the all of like the really long clues are basically flavors. Our base are basically movies that that Margot Robbie was in, but with but with a twist on the word play. Okay, now I get this.

2:23:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I love that. That really makes me happy, and some of them are very challenging. So good pick, I like it, I love it. I should have started with you. You're our special guest. Guests should always go first. What's your pick of the week?

2:23:38 - Stephen Robles
Well, if I would be allowed two quick picks as many as you want.

Yes, Well, one is a app called mapper. This is for iPhone and iPad. It's a $2 application. It's actually a Safari extension, so once you install it you have to enable the extension. But what it does is if you're an Apple Maps user I do, I do like Apple Maps.

When you're in your Safari browser and you search for a business or location, typically, especially if you use Google as your default search engine, you get the Google directions in the Safari browser and you know there's the easy get directions, but it opens in Google Maps. Well, if you like Apple Maps better, mapper will actually redirect. Any time you click a location, like a business, get directions or anything, when you click it in Safari from Google, it'll automatically open it in Apple Maps, and so it's a great, just quick utility. If Apple Maps is your preferred one, this little application will, you know, make it easy just to get all those businesses that you might find in Safari to find to go to it in Apple Maps. Nice, and yeah, it's a fun, fun, fun little thing. Secondly is actually a MagSafe battery pack, because at CES there's CHE2 was the new wireless charging standard. It's actually based on Apple's MagSafe and one of the first ones to market is this anchor CHE2 MagSafe battery pack.

2:24:55 - Leo Laporte
I love the anchor stuff. Okay, what anchor yeah?

2:24:59 - Stephen Robles
This is a 10,000 milliamp hour battery.

2:25:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's small too, that's nice.

2:25:04 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, I mean it's thick compared to the phone. Oh yeah, you're going to get it's chunky, but 10,000 milliamp hours USB-C on this side so you can charge it. It has a built in little like kickstand so you can actually have a little kickstand. Goes in the stand mode If you put your phone on. It also has a screen on this side which will tell you the battery percentage of the battery pack, right here on the screen, and it will tell you, if you plug it into charge, how long it's going to take to charge the battery pack, which is pretty nice. But the biggest benefit is because this is CHE2, which is based on Apple's MagSafe standard. You get 15 Watts of wireless charging from this battery pack, which is way faster than all the battery packs you would have had before, faster than Apple's, faster than any third party battery pack you would have gotten last year, the years prior, and it actually charges really at a decent rate. I've tried it a couple of times. The 15.

2:25:56 - Leo Laporte
Watts. That's what CHE2 is 15 Watts instead of 10, 7.

2:26:00 - Stephen Robles
Instead of like the 5. It's 5. A lot of those CHE2 chargers were 5. Wow, If you got like the anchor MagGo. Previously those were like 5 watt charging and that was pretty much it and it got very hot. That was the other negative side to a lot of those battery packs. This one does not get as hot and it still charges at 15 Watts speeds and it's been great. You can charge like a 14 Pro twice. That's what anchor says that's cool.

I basically get my 15 Pro Max. I can charge it one full time and then I get like 30, 40% afterwards if I exhaust the battery.

2:26:32 - Leo Laporte
And that's a kickstand right.

2:26:34 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, kickstand on the battery, that's so cool.

2:26:36 - Leo Laporte
I like that idea.

2:26:38 - Stephen Robles
And if you need fast charging, this will actually do fast charging for your iPhone if you plug in with the USB-C cable on this side. Okay, fast charging from the battery to your phone if you need to like really get the juice in there quickly. So it's pricey it's $90, but it's the first Cheat 2 battery pack. Belkin has three models coming in March and so those will be different sizes, different prices, but Cheat 2, it's like the real deal.

2:27:03 - Leo Laporte
And it comes with a biobrated USB-C to USB-C cable if you want it comes with a nice cable.

2:27:11 - Stephen Robles
Yeah.

2:27:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's nice Gosh. How heavy is it?

2:27:17 - Stephen Robles
Feel pretty heavy. It's about the same weight as my 15 Pro Max with a case on it.

2:27:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a little heavier.

2:27:24 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's going to be chunky, like if you're walking around a conference with this battery pack on the back, but you know, but you get two more charges.

2:27:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly.

2:27:33 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, I like the stand.

2:27:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking like that's useful for an airplane. Can you turn the phone sideways? You can yeah.

2:27:40 - Stephen Robles
You can stand by mode.

2:27:42 - Leo Laporte
Now you have one of those leather cases, that whose case? Is that this?

2:27:46 - Stephen Robles
is not an Apple case. This is a keyway leather case. I really like it.

2:27:51 - Leo Laporte
So MagSafe works through it just fine.

2:27:53 - Stephen Robles
Oh yeah, oh yeah, nice, it'll work just fine. A lot of cases like that.

2:27:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, steven, it's always pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really really appreciate it, especially on short notice. Jason, what do you got for us?

2:28:09 - Jason Snell
Really nice music utility for the Mac called Sleeve Sleeve version two. It's at replaysoftware it is so it will tell you what currently what's currently playing. It can show album art. It's super configurable so you can make it look exactly as you want. You can have it float above or always be on the desktop layer, or float above when the track changes and then go back to the desktop layer. Lots of different design choices. Yes, it also does hotkeys, so you can use it to set hotkeys to control your Apple music playback. It does scrabbling, so if you're a last FM head you can scrabble.

2:28:50 - Leo Laporte
Do people still scrabble? Is that still a thing?

2:28:52 - Jason Snell
People scrabble on his back man. It's back there scrabbling like it's 2013, I tell you. So it does all the things as an add-on to the music app and I just think it looks really good. I really like the idea that it'll. I used to have like a growl utility that floated my current track when it started playing and then go away again.

This is kind of like that. Also, it's bringing that album art up to the surface and you really choose. You know you don't want the name of the artist, you don't want the name of the album, whatever it is. You can get it to look like that. It's just a really nice. $6 cheap. You can buy it on the Mac App Store directly from Replace Software. I only heard about this a couple of weeks ago and it was an Insta buy. For me, it's just a really nice app. If you spend a lot of time, like I do, listening to music on your Mac while you're working, I recommend it. It's really nice. Sleeve 2.2. It's kind of a weird name, but I'm not going to hold that against him.

2:29:50 - Leo Laporte
It's like a sleeve. Oh, album sleeve oh okay, yeah, that's what it is. I don't know why Sleeve has negative.

2:29:56 - Jason Snell
I don't know it is. As we were sitting here I was like what's the name of that thing? What is it? I had to go find it because it is kind of a weird name, but it's a really beautifully designed with lots of options if you're an Apple Music user on the Mac.

2:30:10 - Leo Laporte
I have to mention a couple of things. First of all, apple did get some Oscar nominations, which I neglected to mention, 13 of them. Napoleon did not go crazy and I didn't deserve to go crazy. After watching it I was thinking this is a terrible movie. A little bit better Killers of the Flower Moon, which scored a Best Picture nomination, best Director nomination, best Actress for Lily Gladstone. Napoleon only got nominations for Costume Design, production Design and Visual Effects. The battle scenes were amazing, but the acting and the plot were not good. Killers of the Flower Moon was very, very long also. I watched it in three stages, but worth watching. Robert De Niro got nominated as well, for he does a really interesting job in Killers of the Flower Moon.

I have a recommendation and a disrecommendation Watch Killers of the Flower Moon. Stay away from Napoleon, unless you love epic battle scenes. The Waterloo battle scene I don't even know how they made it. It's incredible. It's like you're watching the real thing Incredible. My other recommendation comes from, actually, a call we got on Ask the Tech guys.

Somebody said I want to get a Mac, but what about games? Slowly, games have been coming out on the Mac, but here's a really good game that's coming out at the end of the month that you can pre-order right now for 20 bucks. You can play it on the Mac and the iPhone. Have you played Death Stranding yet, john Ashley? No, oh, I love this. I've played it on Windows. I think it plays on the iPad, the Mac and the iPhone. It's from Hideo Kojima. It is not a first person shooter exactly. It's more like you wake up in a weird world and you've got to wander around. But it's really good. I think it'll look beautiful. I'm very interested to see how it looks on the M3. It's iPhone, ipad and Macintosh. If you want to have a AAA title using Metal 3 and Metal FX, high frame rate photo mode and all of that, this might be worth checking out. Death Stranding I think it's using the Half-Life engine, so this might bode well, it's not brand new.

2:32:31 - John Ashley
It came out a few years ago. I think it was Unreal, but I'm not 100% sure.

2:32:36 - Leo Laporte
It says here crossover content from Valve Corporation's Half-Life series oh no, it's, it's a little bit of a structural thing. Oh, it's just like ads.

2:32:44 - John Ashley
Yes, I believe it's Unreal. Yeah, I want to be specific. It's a day or so Interesting, so doing.

2:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he does Unreal right. So that's an interesting thing because for a while, because of the Epic Apple dust-up, we thought maybe there wouldn't be a lot of Unreal Engine stuff on Mac using Metal and so forth.

2:33:00 - John Ashley
Good, good. I mean, this game was made three, four years ago.

2:33:04 - Leo Laporte
It's not the latest by any means, yeah, but still. Still, I enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting and different. Yeah, but the baby you have to carry your. You didn't like carrying a baby around. It wasn't my type of game personally. It's not a first-person shooter. It's not what's your type of game, just out of curiosity. Well, besides card games, you like the. Switch game no Call of the Wild.

2:33:30 - John Ashley
No, I like Zelda, but I mean I play anything that's interesting, like stories.

2:33:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, anyway, I'll mention it because if you pre-order right now, 1999, which is pretty good for a two-year-old AAA, title If he says 2019. 2019, four years old. Wow, Okay, never mind Forget. I even mentioned it. Thank you to Steven Robles, the bearded tutor at beardfm, his new podcast, primarytechfm, and I do believe you have quite a few tutorials on YouTube as well. It's the best thing to do to go to beardfm.

2:34:06 - Stephen Robles
If you go to beardfm, there's links to everything I do, including the YouTube channel. It'll upgrade, you know the iOS 17.3 update video.

2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, oh good Nice.

2:34:16 - Stephen Robles
Yeah, yeah, hoping to get to 100K this year. We'll see if Vision Pro takes me there.

2:34:20 - Leo Laporte
I'm hoping to get to a that's good. 100k Vision Pro could put you over the top pay for itself.

2:34:27 - Stephen Robles
I'm only halfway there. I'm halfway there, I'm like 54.

2:34:29 - Leo Laporte
Would it pay for itself if, like you, got 100K followers?

2:34:33 - Stephen Robles
Oh, yeah, for sure, yeah, For sure.

2:34:35 - Leo Laporte
So see this is the thing you can drive sales of the Vision Pro, people who want to get build their YouTube numbers. Andy and Ako somebody a little bird said you were working offline on your Apple I mean your inaacocom. What's going on there?

2:34:58 - Andy Ihnatko
All I'll say is that, like, I have a list of like eight things that have to be finished and absolutely like fundamental things that have to be solved. I've been solving them as I go, but four of them might be solved by switching to a certain platform that I just started looking into and it's like ooh, I don't have to worry about that, I don't have to. Basically, what's been One of the things that's been holding me back is that I want this to be just. I want this to have as few moving parts as possible. I don't want to have to spend an hour a day doing system maintenance, doing like mailing lists. I want to make it really easy for me to pay me for memberships, because I would like this to be a revenue-generating operation. That would be quite lovely.

2:35:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, and you would tell us that's more moving parts. When you get to and I will exactly when you get there, you'll tell us Absolutely, and you'll tell us how great that platform is or not, how great that platform is.

2:35:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I will Again. I've been looking at there's some interesting options that. This is how long I've been working on this WordPress thing that A first WordPress changed a lot and then alternative to WordPress changed a lot. I've been dragging my feet, or I've been. I've been wool gathering on this project for quite some time. Gbh, I've done GBH. There's been a bit of breaking news so that my Thursday tech talk has been postponed a week. So tune in February 1st, thursday at 12.45.

2:36:17 - Leo Laporte
Go to WGBHnewsorg to listen to it, live or later 21 people so far in my unique playlist and we're getting Foo Fighters oh Chicago Saturday in the Park. That's interesting. The war on drugs, some lot of stuff I've never heard of. So this is good. Keep up the good. And I agree with you on PanoptiCom. I would definitely put that on the list. Good stuff Can.

2:36:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I say that I hope everybody enjoys that, because the idea of I came up with that idea because someone proposed that to me. Like hey, I'm doing it for your friend's birthday. Everyone's submitting one and only one song. And it's like oh, it's not. Like hey, this band is great. Oh, have you ever gone into opera? Oh, this album. Like no, I've been on a track and you don't get to tell a story about why you recommended it. It's like one track that will live or die on its own. And it's like my weekend calendar has just been cleared. This is going to be a fun project as I go through 10,000 tracks in my personal library.

2:37:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's good We've got 18 songs, 21 people. We can go up to 100 people. I think this is a great idea. Thank you, stephen, and I thank you, andy. Welcome.

2:37:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Put your one favorite song in there and I will listen to this song, not even necessarily your favorite, just one One great song, but great right you want to let you have one song that you feel like it should be included in a list of songs. Perfect, whatever reason you want.

2:37:37 - Leo Laporte
Don't even explain it. Okay, I like it and I'm I'm. I'm going to listen on the way home, which means I'll be driving around the block a lot because it's already getting long. Thank you everybody for doing that. Jason Snell, go to sixcolorscom to find out what's up in the world of Apple. It's the best Apple blog of all and you have an upgrade podcast on the anniversary of the yeah, people should check that out.

2:38:02 - Jason Snell
There's an audio version and a YouTube version. It is a.

we did a draft so we had people tell the story of their first Mac best Mac ever best Mac software, best Mac accessory, and also induct something into the Mac hall of shame featuring me and Mike, but also John Gruber, john Syracusa, stephen Hackett, dan Moran and Shelly Brisbane, who have thought a lot about the Mac over the years. If you do YouTube videos, I recommended it. It really came out nicely. But also it's just a podcast you can listen to with your ears if you prefer that.

2:38:35 - Leo Laporte
But it's a good, a nice, fun, special, nostalgic episode, a good fit for this week for the 40th anniversary and you can always ask me, you know, if you ever want me to be on any of those.

2:38:46 - Jason Snell
I hope you're too busy and that was your day off.

2:38:48 - Leo Laporte
I would do it if you wanted me to, but, but I understand, I'm not in that esteemed group of of talented people. But anytime, I just want you to know, I have a microphone and a camera and I'm not afraid to use it.

2:39:01 - Jason Snell
Leela Port says he needs to be on more podcasts Interesting.

2:39:05 - Leo Laporte
Interesting Only yours, only yours, or or or Stevens.

2:39:08 - Stephen Robles
Stevens is our I was going to say, I was going to say, I mean, you know, this sounds like a good one.

2:39:12 - Leo Laporte
I will be listening to it. That's great. As soon as it's 148 minutes, you spend time on this one.

2:39:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's why I didn't invite more people to it. It is no, I mean it is. We go in rounds and, and there are some amazing Well, including the hall of shame, there's a, there's a real shocker in there. So, yeah, it's good stuff.

2:39:29 - Leo Laporte
And, to be fair, I do have my own show that I can tell all those stories on as well, so it's not like you know I need somewhere else to tell those stories. Jason Snell, six colorscom and is the uh? Is the upgrade? Does it have its own feed or is it on the six colors feed? It's on its own.

2:39:47 - Jason Snell
It's it's own feed. Yeah, so you can just search for upgrade wherever you get your podcasts, or go to relayfm, and it'll be on the homepage there.

2:39:53 - Leo Laporte
Or on YouTube is what I'm thinking.

2:39:56 - Jason Snell
Or the upgrade podcast on YouTube.

2:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Okay, Cause I want to. I want to watch the. The. Uh, oh yeah, there it is Latest from upgrade podcast. 40th anniversary of the Mac. Why do you say draft?

2:40:08 - Jason Snell
Well, it's like a sports draft, so everybody turns it. If somebody picks it before you do, you don't get it.

2:40:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, that's fun.

2:40:15 - Jason Snell
So there's some little games.

2:40:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, never asked me to do that ever. I don't want to do that. Thank you, jason, you're the best. Thank you, andy, love you. Thank you very much, Stephen Robles, for filling in beard.fm, uh, for the bearded tutor and the brand new podcast. I'm excited about that. How many episodes have you done?

2:40:36 - Stephen Robles
Three, three episodes and it was really well received. And so we were near you on the charts in the first week, but we couldn't keep up. So those charts, don't matter they.

2:40:46 - Leo Laporte
they're only, you know, primarytech.fm. That's what matters.

2:40:50 - Stephen Robles
Kids, that's what matters.

2:40:52 - Leo Laporte
We do Mac break weekly on a Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, that would be 2,200. No, no, that would be 1900 UTC. You can. The reason I mentioned that you can turn on a YouTube stream when we're doing actually doing the show, as we are right now youtubecom slash twit After the fact, of course, is easier. You can listen at your own leisure, whether you get the podcast from the website twittv slash mbw or you go to the dedicated YouTube channel for Mac break weekly. Youtubecom slash Mac break weekly, or a subscribe. I think that's the best thing to do in your favorite podcast catcher. That way, you just get it automatically the minute that we've had it put it out. Don't forget to join the club. Take the survey. We'll see you next week, but now I'm sad to say it is my duty to tell you you need to get back to work because break time is over, that's it. Bye bye.

2:41:44 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of club twit, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater geekatude.