MacBreak Weekly 945 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 MacBreak Weekly. I'm wearing my Halloween garb. Alex Lindsay is not, nor is, sad to say, Jason Snell, nor is Andy Ihnatko. In fact, I'm really here all alone, but I'm glad you're here keeping me company. Put on some weird stuff while you watch the show and make me feel better. We do talk about the big Apple announcements. This is Apple Week. We've got a new iMac, a new Mac Mini. What's coming tomorrow and what is Apple Intelligence doing so far? All of that coming up next on a special Halloween edition of MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 945, recorded Tuesday, October 29th 2024. 80 out of 80. Happy Halloween, everybody, or almost Halloween. It's time for mac break weekly and there are gifts under the Halloween tree. But first let's say hello to Jason Snell of sixcolors.com. Hello, Jason.

0:01:09 - Jason Snell
It's a spooky tree.

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
It's the nightmare before Christmas.

0:01:15 - Jason Snell
That's right, it's the Mac-mare before Halloween. No, no, no. Happy Mac Week. Happy Halloween Week. Happy Mac Week.

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
I really like this, but we'll talk about it in a second. Also, Andy Ihnatko go from WG In Boston. Hello.

0:01:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Andrew. Hello, hope you enjoy. I'm wearing my skeleton costume, but the party's not till later tonight, so I'm wearing muscles and skin and body hair over it. I love that. I want to look like an idiot.

0:01:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

0:01:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Great, great costume.

0:01:41 - Leo Laporte
The drilling has begun once again in my, in my studio, so apologies for the low hum.

0:01:53 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not your. It's not your your headphones. That's certainly not really happening. He's got in the next room over there. We made a mistake. Sure that only kids who have perfect teeth get candy.

0:02:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's good, very good. Also here, Alex Lindsay from officehours.global and 090.media.

0:02:07 - Alex Lindsay
Hello Alex, hello I guess you could say that these releases are scary good.

0:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Scary Fast was last year. These are scary faster than Scary Fast, aren't they the M4s? So is it going to be every day this week? What do you think? Yes, I mean.

0:02:25 - Jason Snell
John Ternus. They've been releasing these videos and today's video it's like a little advent calendar. We can throw that in there as the similes here the Halloween advent calendar. He said we'll be back tomorrow with another great Mac announcement. So I mean there's one left on Mark Gurman's checklist which is the MacBook Pro, so it would not surprise me if that is tomorrow.

0:02:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and Jaws tweeted out last week oh, we've got a whole week of Mac announcements. So yeah, right now we are. I mean, like Jason said, we are kind of checking off, like okay, he said we'd see this Great Check off, we see when to Mac Mini Check off. Amazon was also nice enough to post the sales page early, so we got a little extra sneak peek at that, a bonus, and so now we're just waiting for our MacBooks.

0:03:05 - Alex Lindsay
And we now have learned that it's 8 o'clock Pacific Standard Time. I think that Amazon's thing was. Someone screwed it up and thought it was 11, you know 6, you know whatever. It's 5 o'clock 5 am or whatever. Whenever it came out, it was probably three hours offset.

0:03:16 - Jason Snell
Time zone, so confusing.

0:03:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Time zone issue in the release o'clock pacific, you know whatever so, but somebody's breaking down boxes, starting tomorrow, at least for the next three months you know, office hours is running during that time.

0:03:29 - Alex Lindsay
So on monday we were surprised. By tuesday we were like, hey, we're just gonna stay on the show here for another five minutes and see what happens so at eight o'clock, and and uh, and there, there it was, and so we were excited so they started monday with a new iMac, new colors, yeah all of this sort of same colors, but new shades of those colors anyway, oh, it's the same colors but different shade.

0:03:50 - Leo Laporte
I like the purple.

0:03:51 - Jason Snell
They look nice they look really nice.

0:03:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're very colorful and they are, of course, as everything will be this week based on the m4.

0:03:59 - Jason Snell
Yeah, big upgrade here. And if you were to think back to when the m1 iMac was released, it was released shortly after they introduced the first iPad that had center stage and we thought, ok, apple's doing it, they're going to have auto tracking for video from now on and all their products. And then they came out with the M1 iMac and it had a 720p or whatever webcam bad webcam that didn't do center stage, it was too low quality. And then they did the M3 iMac and they didn't make any changes to the hardware at all. Good news the m4 iMac has a uh, a 12 megapixel camera and does center stage. So actually as a webcam, it should be much, much better than the one that was in the previous iMacs, that's think. In some ways other than the chip and the things that come along with it, the biggest change to the whole thing is that they've got the proper webcam now.

0:04:53 - Leo Laporte
They hide the expensive one. It's so funny. Maybe it's because I have an expanded view. But the fourth one is hidden below.

0:05:01 - Jason Snell
They really get you in the last row, yeah $1899.

0:05:06 - Leo Laporte
This is the 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24 gigs of memory and 512 gigs of storage, that's like you know you can upgrade that.

0:05:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can get two terabytes and a whole lot of.

0:05:15 - Alex Lindsay
RAM and it'll. Yeah, I got a Mac Mini up to almost five grand this morning.

0:05:20 - Leo Laporte
Really yeah. Yeah, it's easy to do so. New on these iMacs nanotexture glass. That's the matte finish, right yeah yeah, nanotexture, all the things.

0:05:28 - Jason Snell
I actually think that that's a brilliant choice for the iMac. You might think, like the iMac's low-end, why does it need that? But the thing is iMacs are in environments. Right, don't get to choose like, but there's a window behind me, it's like too bad, that's where the iMac goes. So having, I think iMacs probably suffer a lot of glare problems and less than a laptop where you could just take it somewhere else or rotate your chair or whatever they have to. Actually they have to actually just sit there and take it. So having nanotexture is there. And then, yeah, in terms of, as the chats are saying, the various chats with a lot of this, the 8 gig RAM floor seems to be gone right, like Apple seems to have finally just said look 16. And we're going to talk about.

There's some interesting quirks on the Mac Mini that we'll talk about in a minute in terms of how they're laying out the RAM, but here it's just straightforward. It starts at 16 and 256 storage, which again is kind of meager, but it gets you in the door and it's fairly easy to buy outboard storage if you really really want it. You can get a Samsung drive on Amazon, two terabytes pretty cheap. But yeah, it's the webcam and the base storage and there's some good stuff and nanotexture again. I think it's good because you know if you are parked at a desk or a table or a hotel check-in or wherever and there's a big bay window behind you like you're screwed.

0:07:02 - Leo Laporte
So nanotexture? Get them to put your pony up for the nanotexture. Is this the nanotexture? You have to have a special cloth to clean.

0:07:06 - Jason Snell
You have to to, but it helps say yeah, I'm sure there's a claw in the box if you order the nanotexture. Yes, because you're supposed to just sort of like you know you're not supposed to put stuff on it or you mess up the texture.

0:07:15 - Leo Laporte
Right layer. Yeah, disappointed that it maxes at 32 gigs of memory Establishing. It is not a non-pro device, I mean, it's just a limitation of the base M4 processor right.

0:07:28 - Jason Snell
It's like if you want more, get more.

0:07:31 - Andy Ihnatko
And also the most important thing was to get rid of that 8-gig floor. Because even when they were saying, let me explain to you idiots why it's not important on a Mac 8 gigs on a Mac is the same as 16 on a PC.

That's like when they retooled the MacBook and got rid of the SD slot. They said we feel that photographers are using wireless to transfer photos. Now you can see the words turning into molten brass in their mouth because they know that they're just. Oh, we've got to say this. We've got to say this. So yeah, so long as they change the floor, that's fine. 32 on an iMac, that's fine. This is as Jason said.

It's the pretty Mac. It's the one where you take it out of the box and it looks dynamite, where there's all kinds of colors, not just because some people want a purple iMac, but because the decor in that salon might need something that's lilac, and so it's not going to be. I mean the fact that it's still. I'm slightly disappointed that if you bought one as your main Mac, I think the cheaper ones only support one external display. The top-of-the-line one supports two, so there's a limit there. That's compared to the Mac Mini that supports three out of the box. But for what it's supposed to do, I think it's very well kitted out for that. It looks like a beautiful Mac.

0:08:49 - Alex Lindsay
And technically it is still three displays right.

0:08:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Because it's the iMac plus the two other displays. But even the super cheap, the $599 Mac Mini will support three displays.

0:09:00 - Alex Lindsay
That's what I should have said, and 32 gigs is probably enough for a solid 98% of the population when we talk about like oh, I wish it would go under 32,. I was like who's really neat, who really needs it? I mean, you can edit a lot, I'm sorry.

0:09:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I think it's more about future-proofing than anything else, because it's yet to be discovered what not only the AI apps of the newer versions of macOS are going to need, but also that, plus any AI enabled apps that you choose to install yourself, like how much RAM, is proving to be like the stumbling block started, like two years ago, with phones saying, oh well, there are features that are great, built into Android or that Samsung's developing, but we can't give it to you because you don't have enough RAM. We've seen that before.

0:09:42 - Alex Lindsay
But our phones have right.

0:09:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean it's not right, but but again, that's, that's the, that's a, that's the future proofers, I think, people who are maximizing ram. That's always a good idea if you still have money left in the kitty, because it is the one thing that you can't expand upon. You can get a thunderbolt uh, a thunderbolt drive with two gig, two terabytes of ssd storage and it works just great. You can't do anything about ram, but this is it's as long as they give you enough of ceiling that you feel as though you are going to get that five or ten years that you often expect to get out of a mac. That's a. That's a good move.

0:10:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad they did it all right, they are claiming that the m4 in this, uh, iMac is twice as fat, 1.7 times faster. iMac is twice as fast, 1.7 times faster. In one place it said 1.7,. In another place it said almost twice as fast as the M1. That's a big jump actually.

0:10:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a big thing If you're thinking about upgrading from an M3, I don't know about an M2, but if you bought an M1 to get onto the Apple Silicon bandwagon and you haven't upgraded since, then those people are really going to see some stuff when they upgrade to M4. Those are going to be some valuable upgrades.

0:10:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think one of the challenges for Apple really is that you, I think intelligence makes a big, makes a lot of sense for them for getting people to upgrade, because these M1s, these M series are so fast and the M4 is so fast that there aren't that many apps that actually challenge the processors.

I mean, we find that I mean I have M1s that are eight gigs and they will put out eight 1080p 30 signals out of a, out of a black magic card, and they run at about 55% and that's the. That's the early eight M1s with eight gigs, you know. And so this one, I think if we take something like Zoom ISO, we're going to probably do head-to-head soon with it. I bet you we can put out as many as Zoom ISO will let us and we'll still be at 25%, 30%, 35% of the capacity and that'll be like 16 1080p outputs coming out of this thing of raw video, and I think that that is so the challenge you get into is that people don't use these for games. If they don't use them for those things, it, it, the games constantly are pressing it. I think that some of the announcements that Apple made about the ray tracing thing by the way, as someone who used to render a show. A silver, highly reflective ship is kind of a you're like sure, like you know, like it's, it's fine.

0:12:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I mean for rate tracing is easy.

0:12:06 - Alex Lindsay
Sorry, it's, it's easier than it sounds that the calculate, the rate tracing, calculation is is easier than it sounds, so it's great to throw it into the like hey, but for me I'm like hey, how about real-time global illumination? And then everyone doesn't want to talk about that.

0:12:19 - Andy Ihnatko
So rate tracing you're kind of like okay, sure, knock yourself out Two things. There's so much that is unknown about the next two or three years everywhere in computing, and AI is the question about that, and there was a comment in the chat, lewis MJ, and he says that's predicting AI is even going to take off in the future. It might, it might not, who knows. But the thing is that I'm wondering if the difference in headroom between what an average user or even an aggressive user needs versus the most current silicon is if that's going to shrink, because the most expensive thing about AI is that you can create these really great features in Adobe Photoshop, these generative editors, these generative AI features, but those makers are going to want as much of that to run on the actual silicon as possible, because anything that they have to do on servers is going to cost them. So I think that a lot of the overhead is going to increase if these AI features become a big deal.

As for ray tracing, yeah, I'll absolutely take your word for it. It is a big deal because it's another sign of how aggressively Apple is pursuing gaming. It's like it would be so easy for them to concede that. Well, we feel as though we have products that are really great gaming computers. They're just not for AAA games. They're not going to compete with a $4,000 custom-made PC that is engineered specifically for gaming. They're actually aggressively to compete with a $4,000 custom-made PC that is engineered specifically for gaming. They're actually aggressively going for that. And when you talk about doing ray tracing as something that the hardware can handle on its own, that's customized to handle on its own. When you look at game demos of here's ray tracing turned on, here's ray tracing turned off, that's the difference between wow, that's really good graphics and wow, that's graphics. That's the difference between wow, that's really good graphics and wow, that's graphics. So I think that's very impressive that they continue to put in a hardware feature into the CPU that really I think is just for gaming, it's not for normal people.

0:14:16 - Alex Lindsay
I think, as a non-CGI, you always look at it going, hey, it's great to talk about the easy stuff and not talk about the hard stuff. So you'll ask about global elimination. Or we'll say, hey, it'd be really great if you had really good anti-aliasing, like without any. So here's the if you watch your game, your favorite game, or anything in Unreal, or for those of us doing graphics, just look at the curved edges and look at the angled edges and look at the little stair step that goes down that end. That's aliasing. And the way to fix that is to render it at two, four, six, eight times bigger and then scale it back down again and it blends that all back in. And being able to do that at 140 frames a second is a thing Like that.

You say we have, you know, 4x or 8X anti-aliasing. You have my undivided attention. If you say I have ray tracing, you're like, okay, Sure, knock yourself out. You know, so it's, but that you know at at high frame rates, with, with anti-aliasing, I think that I personally think that makes more of a difference than ray tracing. You know, and um, because there's a lot of ways to cheat reflections, you know, and so um, they sometimes when they do those demos, you feel like they turned off a lot of things they didn't need to. And then they turn on ray tracing and they're like look at the big difference, because you know, I rendered everything I rendered without any ray tracing.

0:15:31 - Leo Laporte
So I think that that's the You're saying back in the day with the Star Wars thing.

0:15:36 - Jason Snell
Also for what it's worth. The ray tracing was an M3 generation. I believe innovation. So the M3 iMac also had this feature.

0:15:44 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and again, I think that Apple's going to have a hard time getting gamers to come over. They really need to think about building a couple. I mean, I know they have Apple Arcade and they hire people to do little games, but they, of all of this, is the company to for them to partner with. I mean, which would be hard right now, but it would be Bungie, because Bungie started on a Mac Bungie. You know, halo is just Marathon, which started on the Mac. It'd be really fun to bring them back into the fold.

0:16:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah off is that it's not about making sure that, trying to make the Mac into a AAA gaming platform and getting people to understand see the iPad and the iPhone that way. That's a little bit about selling Macs and selling iPhones and iPads. It's mostly about selling transactions through the App Store, because the Apple App Store absolutely kicks the Android to Google Play stores, but in terms of money spent per user it's by a factor of four or five, I think six. The last time I checked was last week but the numbers are kind of fading from my mind. But the lion's share of that I think close to half is entertainment and in-app purchases and that means that if you can sell somebody a $60 game, you might also be selling them hundreds of dollars of in-app purchases in the future. And if you get 30% of kind of all that, then Apple's very, very well impressed by here's how well we could benefit by getting more developers comfortable with porting their AAA games over, including that new tool for just porting Windows games straight over to their metal.

0:17:24 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that the challenge really is is, again, they need apps like AAA games because they need them to push the hardware, because right now they are, the hardware is running away from the apps. You know, and this is the problem the iPad has had forever, the iPad has way more horsepower than almost any of the apps that sit on top of it. Use, you know, and so, being able, you know, apple needs to be constantly working with folks that are going to push that envelope out so that they and I think that we're, as we look at a lot of the spatial computing and so on and so forth that Apple's talking about, the processing for spatial video is going to need the pros Like these. Mac Minis and iMacs don't even start to be able to have the power that's going to be required to do 8K per eye, 90 frames, a second kind of work. So it'll be interesting to see how that rolls out.

0:18:08 - Leo Laporte
All you nerds could talk all you want about those things, but I'm going to tell you what people really care about. Two things One it's going to come with stickers.

0:18:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Does it? No, it doesn't. I bet it doesn't.

0:18:19 - Alex Lindsay
We'll find out on November 8th, I got a bunch of new of the Apple trackers and I you know. By the way, there is a limit, I've hit it.

0:18:28 - Leo Laporte
How many is the max number of trackers? 24, 32, 64.

0:18:35 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's like 30 or 40.

0:18:35 - Leo Laporte
Hold on, let's see.

0:18:36 - Alex Lindsay
Hold on, I have. It doesn't number them, but I think that I'm at 30. I think it's yeah, yeah, it's 30.

0:18:48 - Leo Laporte
It looks like 30, 30 is the? Is the? I'll have to look. I mean, I can't even imagine what your phone would look like. Is you? If you wander away from all of those air tags? 30 notifications say hey, they're not. Hey wait, hey, no, you're not. Never. So this is what people really care about. One look at the wallpaper on the new iMac. Look at it carefully. It says iMac.

0:19:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I love that. Every single piece of new packaging, like if the Mac Mini says Mini, the iPhone. Pro has Pro hidden in there. It's like my goodness and it's subtle too.

0:19:20 - Leo Laporte
You almost pat yourself on the back for spotting it. Oh, I didn't see it until somebody told me, and then I had to really look and then now I can't unsee it.

0:19:30 - Andy Ihnatko
But yeah, see it till. Somebody told me, and then I had to really look and then now I can't unsee it. But yeah, uh, yeah. The other thing is they didn't. I was paying people to do that. I should say as an aside someone says apple paid somebody to take here's your time budget for doing these these wallpapers to hide these words in macy's day balloons, but it should say iMac, how about that?

0:19:41 - Leo Laporte
can you do that? Uh, the other thing is, of course, type c. Uh, charging on the mouse and the keyboard. Yep, and let's get this out of the way. What the hell it's still underneath the mouse.

0:19:53 - Andy Ihnatko
It takes like two minutes to charge what every three months?

it's low hanging fruit if it's I would understand it if it were practical to use this. Well, actually, if we're practical to use this mouse in any way, shape or form. But I digress. But it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're making fun of that, where else are you going to put it? Because you're going to sacrifice the looks. And once again, if you charge, it's like complaining about how the Apple pencil you have to remove a cap to plug it into USB. Like again, you're going to be charging this up rarely, literally, if you have to go to the bathroom plug it in and it's good for months.

0:20:22 - Leo Laporte
It's that fast, really it is that fast?

0:20:24 - Jason Snell
I think you can. They said you can get all day from five minutes or two minutes or something and it lasts for a long time. And yeah, john gruber actually wrote a piece defending it which, uh, even he seemed surprised about it, but he said he talked to somebody at apple who's a designer who said they absolutely looked at doing different designs, uh, with it not on the, and they thought it looked bad and was bad. And I think that this yes, it's an easy to take, a cheap shot totally doesn't matter and is irrelevant in people's lives.

0:20:54 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I like cheap shots. Cheap shots are me. In this economy, cheap shots are the best, most economic shot value. Excuse me, but that was a cheap shot. That was a very expensive shot we'll have you know um anything else to say about these imax. Before we move on, because there is other stuff to talk about, I just want to make sure we cover it thoroughly. Thunderbolt 4 thunderbolt 4 video app. Uh, wi-fi what is it? Wi-fi 6e is it that we are getting now?

0:21:27 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's a low end. It's a low-end, slow computer is what it is.

0:21:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah but it has high fidelity six speakers system with force canceling woofers I don't know where, somewhere in there.

0:21:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, that's impressive. They put the money into that. I mean it's. I mean it's not surprising that apple would always make sure they have the best sounding whatever on the block.

0:21:46 - Leo Laporte
But the iMac is not necessarily like ipad pros sound pretty darn good actually, so I don't know, this is a similar configuration, since this is basically an ipad on a stick, a 24 inch ipad on a stick. It's so thin, so thin, it's 10 it's a great, great little computer.

0:22:03 - Jason Snell
it's one of those computers that I wish that I had a use for, but I don't, because it's beautiful, I mean I we have one of the gym. Yeah, I get one um to review, and I'm always sad when I send them home afterward because they're they're beautiful and fun to have around, but it just doesn't fit.

0:22:19 - Leo Laporte
I mean Lisa likes to cosplay a towel boy.

So, she checks me into the gym on her iMac and uh says, look, whatever keeps it fresh man. Uh, I don't. She wants what she wanted one down there. She, we bought her one, uh, at the studio and and everybody, uh, I was smart enough not to. But everybody said don't get an iMac now there'll be new ones. But she bought it and now we have it and there's not much we could do with it, so it's in the gym. So if she needs to get online in the gym, she can.

0:22:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, David. David Chobb in the chat reminded me of targeted display mode for the old iMacs and how much, how great it was. Oh I missed that you could I mean even even when the thing was like useless as a computer. It wasn't just beautiful as a static object, it could be a very, very pretty external display. For a while I had one as my living room like living room setup with a Raspberry Pi setup with it, and that's a lovely way to add extra value to the cost of the product.

0:23:16 - Leo Laporte
Steve Kropf. Carl is saying in our YouTube chat let me click the right button. Carl is saying oh, thank you, jerry. We appreciate that, but I didn't mean to click that self-congratulatory chat message. He's saying you could put your own drive in. Is that the case, or are these kind of unopenable?

0:23:35 - Jason Snell
No, you would attach that externally and I mean, I've done that. You can. Just for an iMac, you just Velcro it on the back, tape it on the back, it's just, it's fine.

0:23:46 - Leo Laporte
Is it as?

0:23:46 - Jason Snell
fast on Thunderbolt 4 as an internal drive. Finding a Thunderbolt 4 SSD will be more expensive than just like USB 3. So it really just depends on how much speed you need and right like I would pay enough, like since I do video stuff, I would probably want enough space that I could be exporting my project and rendering my project on the internal stuff. That's the fastest it possibly can be, but I can stash a bunch of other stuff externally.

0:24:15 - Alex Lindsay
And I think it depends on how fast it is. Like with my older Mac studio it's five gigs a second internally. There's no way to get to that without an iodine. There's an iodine drive system that will let you plug into all the thunderbolts and then you can get back to the same speed, but outside of that you can't get up about 3.3.7. That's fine upper limit and I want to say about the thing but when you take, when you stack six, 6k raw files and you're trying to edit them and resolve, that's when it should do. That on iMac is what you should turn on studio target display mode.

0:24:50 - Jason Snell
Uh, that was another thing that every time I review an iMac I point out that, like they, they took it away for good reasons when that first, that first 5k iMac like it's like they didn't there wasn't a connector that could do external uh, 5k at that point right like they, they were doing wild stuff on the inside to do it exactly right.

However, we have come a long way and I would say that that one of the worst things about the iMac as a product is that it is not the display will last.

Probably there's that story about how some of the m1 iMacs are having display issues, so we'll see. But, like, theoretically, a display will last a lot longer than the computer's usable life, and what you should be able to do is repurpose it as an external display, and Apple should absolutely, if they're this here. Ok, I'm getting a little mad about this because I did this when I reviewed the M3 iMac. If Apple's committed to the environment and is boasting about their carbon neutral this and carbon neutral, that, if Apple's committed to the environment and is boasting about their carbon neutral this and carbon neutral, that you know what's good for the environment is making your iMac displays repurposable after they're done with their natural life as a computer, and it's really shameful that they haven't done that yet. They could totally build it that way so that you could put it in a mode where it just becomes a monitor, and they haven't, and at this point, they don't have an excuse, it's just a failure this point.

0:26:05 - Andy Ihnatko
They don't have an excuse, it's just a failure. It'd be lovely if all they did was work closely with Google's Chrome OS team and make sure the Chrome OS Flex works great on pretty much everything they do, which is really just a case of not making sure that, if there's anything that is kind of in the way that there's a way to get that out of the way, because that's the simplest way to recycle any old machine at this point, because Chrome OS Flex will give you a brand new, essentially the latest version of Chrome and so the latest security, the latest updates, everything like that. That's and yeah, I think you're absolutely right there. It's, it's, it's.

It breaks my heart when I go to, like my town's recycling center and I see what are. I know these are rehabbable machines. I know that they're without even taking them apart and taking out the panel and ordering from AliExpress a new display interface you can turn into like HDMI or whatever like that. It's like there are people who need these and there are people who can actually use these. Why are we throwing them away? And I'm glad you mentioned that about the original M1 generation iMacs. Apparently, on Apple support, there are a bunch of users complaining that they're getting a whole bunch of horizontal lines on the bottom of the screen that seem to have something to do with a bad connector. But it's out of warranty and so you might be SOL. I hope that if this turns out to be an endemic display problem, apple can figure out a way to at least make you feel less hosed for not buying 10 years of AppleCare in advance at least make you feel less hosed for not buying 10 years of apple care in advance.

0:27:30 - Leo Laporte
I also like it that I can buy, uh, an iMac to match my shirt, yeah one for every mood, every shot. Yeah, I will be, I will be buying the orange, uh, iMac, uh, just just for the days that I wear this colors. Thank you, goof paul. That's nice we do have viewers in tick to.

0:27:44 - Jason Snell
Another quirk of the iMac is that they are continuing with their program of having color-matched peripherals. So if you get the orange iMac, it comes with a color-matched orange keyboard and trackpad or mouse or whatever you decide to order. Those aren't available to everybody. The ones on the store are just, I think, the silver and the dark gray ones on the store are just the. I think the silver and the and the dark gray, um, and so you have to do otherwise. If you want to do it, you have to do what I did, which is wait a year and then go on ebay so pretty go on ebay and then and then buy the orange one that you always wanted.

But you have to, you can't otherwise get it. So they will be there eventually. I understand why they wouldn't necessarily want to stock all of them in stores. It's a little too bad. You can't just order them online. If you want an orange keyboard, you could get one, but just wait because some people don't like Apple keyboards, and they will sell them on eBay, and so you'll be able to get them later.

0:28:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually that makes a lot of sense, because once you buy it, it comes with it, right, and if you don't want to use that funky mouse, you want to use a mouse that actually charges from the back, for instance you might replace those and then you can sell it, and then you can sell it.

0:28:50 - Jason Snell
It's a collector's item.

0:28:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Make some money, just like there are people who sold off the black USB-C cables off of their Mac Pros because that's the only black Apple or was it a Thunderbolt cable ever? It's like yeah, there are people who are now like middle-aged and they've got all their retirement money saved up or they've struck it big in their 20s and 30s and they don't think they don't care about spending a thousand dollars on a cable. If it, it goes matchy-matchy. And those of us who are again freelance journalists. In a rapidly collapsing market, there's a reason why we don't throw things away uh, all right, let's take a break because there's other stuff to talk about.

0:29:28 - Leo Laporte
I want to get to the mini, of course, spend some time with that. Apple. Intelligence arrived this week also. I mean, let's not get that two ways in two ways. Okay, we got 18.1 and 15.1. Yeah, 15.1 for mac os, sonoma and or sequoia.

I'm sorry and then uh, 18 one for iOS and iPad OS and also watch has got updated. Tv's got everything got it, so we'll talk about that as well. We have lots to talk about. This is mac break weekly.

We are so glad you are watching the show and if you watch it live, you are watching now on eight different streaming platforms I mentioned. We've added tick tock to the mix. So our esteemed club members seven dollars a month ad free versions of all the shows, additional content we don't provide in public those esteemed club members get, get club access inside our discord. There's a Youtube channel youtube.com/twitlive. twitch.tv/twit, which might be a little bit confusing, but there is a difference. There is x.com, no longer Twitter, but that's good. Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. Ah, missing one. Anyway, there's eight of them and if you want to watch, remember we are going to change to standard time next week, so we are currently at 11 am Pacific. This will not change 2 pm Eastern, but around the world some people are in summertime still, some are not. It's confusing. Our UTC will be now at 1900 UTC so you can tune in one of those live streams. Really the best way to watch, though, is subscribe or watch on Youtube, so you don't have to do it while we're exactly while we're on the air.

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People are saying what is Leo wearing? It's Halloween day. After tomorrow you're going to be a busy boy on Halloween Jason because apple's quarterly results will come out.

0:33:57 - Jason Snell
Then you have to make all those colorful charts run my, run my scripts and generate my charts and see how much money they made. And is there anything in?

0:34:06 - Leo Laporte
particular. Look you're looking at like any kind of little clue. Apple doesn't tell you numbers of sales and things right, it's all revenue based.

0:34:14 - Jason Snell
At this point, I mean we'll get a. We'll get maybe some initial insights on how they're feeling about the iphone, because the the very beginning of iphone sales, right, because it's from basically the end of september. So there's a couple weeks of iPhone sales that'll be in there, so they'll be able to characterize it, but you won't see the huge number that happens the following quarter, the holiday quarter.

0:34:32 - Andy Ihnatko
So we'll see.

0:34:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's always a little color in there, but yeah, we'll just see how they. Oftentimes the statements that they make about what they're thinking for the next quarter are the most important thing that they say.

0:34:44 - Leo Laporte
what they're thinking for the next quarter are the most important thing that they say yeah and no. Vision Pro specifics in all likelihood.

0:34:50 - Jason Snell
Seems unlikely.

0:34:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it might get the passing. This has been a terrific year. We've shipped many groundbreaking products, including the Vision Pro, and with the debut of Apple Intelligence, we'll keep us on the forefront of blah, blah, blah. I'd be surprised if they don't say the words it'll, it'll be a box on the bingo card, but they won't, they won't, they won't mention that. We think that maybe we might have sold a little bit less, but almost as much as we had hoped, that maybe we would have right and we then. I think that there's a new guy who's developing a new app for it if I had a prediction, they would say you know our.

0:35:24 - Jason Snell
We released our, the groundbreaking first narrative film for Vision Pro, submerged this month yeah, that's all you need.

0:35:31 - Leo Laporte
They probably will talk about China and India. Uh, the new iPhones will be it. It turns out, uh, uh, partially assembled in India now, which is, of course, the next biggest market after China.

0:35:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah not there. You know, there's a report that not just like partially assembled but like the next version of it, which is that's putting you right in the big leagues immediately. I imagine that. So what? Tim cook was in china last week and reassuring the chinese as well, right? Yeah, I mean that must have been this. That must have been kind of a testy meeting, because number one he has to convince he did.

He has made public statements again in the Chinese media saying no, we are great, we really really rely on China, we love their manufacturing, we've got a long-term partnership with them. At the same time, clearly they are hedging their bets with India and doing so aggressively. They're not just trying to meet some sort of government requirement that some of the phones sold in India must be manufactured in India. They clearly are factoring India as part of their larger plans. At the same time, he had to be sort of sweet-talking the ministers into yeah, let's figure out how to get Apple intelligence working in China. We definitely want that to happen, and please don't hold this over our heads, as we continue to seem to be relying on you a little bit less. Yeah.

0:36:47 - Leo Laporte
He did To his credit he's good at cultural assimilation Flash the traditional Chinese peace sign, which, for some reason I don't know, when I was there in 2009, all the girls who did selfies with my good-looking son flashed the peace sign. So I guess Tim is doing a selfie with the peace sign. So I guess tim is doing a selfie with the peace sign.

0:37:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess I don't know I associate that with anime girls, but I'm old yeah, I don't.

0:37:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe maybe it's still the thing. Uh, according to cnbc and an analyst or some analysts, tim cook is likely visiting china to bolster support for apple intelligence. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. President Biden just signed an executive order saying we're not going to sell them or give them. We can't give them AI stuff that they could use against us.

0:37:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Not only that, but the Chinese government themselves are not going to prove in AI that it's not homegrown. So, whatever they do, and also if they're going to continue their same private computing strategy for there, they're going to continue their same, uh, their same private, uh, private computing strategy for their. They're going to figure out how they're going to figure out a way to get these custom apple chips into china to make it work that way. And who knows, who knows if, if the given that there are lots of chinese trade bans and intellectual property bans, who knows if they'll even be allowed to do that? So that's kind of testy. Uh, there was a as part of the Apple intelligence announcement on the Apple newsroom site. They did say that AI is going to be coming to the EU early next year. But I don't think they can. I'd be really surprised if they promised any sort of a target gay for day for China, because there's a lot of dancing they got to do.

0:38:25 - Leo Laporte
Analyst at CounterPoint said the trip seems notable now as the company could be looking to shore up collaboration with local players to launch Apple intelligence in China. They'll need a local partner for the.

0:38:37 - Alex Lindsay
LLM, I guess I think a lot of the AI stuff also gives Apple a little cover, though, because they're slowly moving out of China for a whole wide variety of reasons and so saying, well, we can't you know like it's harder to do it here and we have to move some of the stuff to other places. Uh, gives them a little bit of room to work, because and or leverage right.

0:38:56 - Leo Laporte
They say you want us to continue to manufacture in shenzhen. I think you need uh intelligence.

0:39:01 - Alex Lindsay
It's probably less about leverage and more about if there's a war between taiwan and in china, apple will not be able to produce anything in china like that, you know, like they will. Like that'll all go away, and so I think everyone's trying to before the projected uh window of 2028. Everyone's trying to get out of town.

0:39:18 - Andy Ihnatko
So so anyway. So it's, we'll see. Yeah, it's. It's crazy, the the there was some good news for their uh work in China in that they are now the iPhone is back in the top five of phone hardware in China, which wasn't the case for most of this year, I think it's.

One of the big wild cards here is that Huawei is believed by a lot of people in the US government to be essentially a government owned company at this point. At the very least, that they are very, very well attuned to. Here is what the government wants out of China's leading phone maker. So we were absolutely gonna do what they asked to do. So there's a question as to if things either deteriorate or develop over the next three or four years. Is China even going to be terribly interested in giving the iPhone advantages over Huawei's phone? Already, they developed an entirely brand new from the ground up the first brand new from the ground up mobile OS for their next I think it's called Honor OS to power the latest versions of Huawei phones, completely getting rid of the Linux kernel, completely getting rid of Android. It is 100% its own and that's part of the strategy of we want everything to be absolutely homegrown and homemade and therefore 100% within the control of any edict that we wish to hand down.

0:40:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, apple ships $6 billion worth of iPhones from India. Exports of the iPhone raised a third in six months. Through september, the total will probably be something like 10 billion dollars in iphones, according to people familiar with the matter, because apple, of course, doesn't reveal those numbers. So, yeah, it's uh made sense strategically. He's tim cook. Wow, he's a master of diplomacy isn't it 100?

0:41:06 - Andy Ihnatko
that's that's. That's a great thing, I mean he would. I don't think he would have gotten this far if not for the fact that he can do that dance. He can make everybody feel as though they're being listened to and a little bit happy, and let's just hope he keeps dancing on the right side of the Angels and knows that, knows he and the people who he is negotiating with, knows what line he can't be asked to cross because he would be forced not to cross it and that would be disastrous for all sides.

0:41:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah um, all right, I I kind of teased you a little bit. I just stuck something else in. It's a little.

0:41:35 - Jason Snell
It's about impulse control I know you want to talk about it. Come on, it's a palette cleanser. It's good, it's a palette something a little bit between.

0:41:44 - Leo Laporte
So today this morning, 8 am pacific, uh, apple announced the new Mac Mini were there any surprises. The one thing people seem to be noticing is that the power button's on the bottom that's fun, I mean it's got to be somewhere. I mean it's got to be somewhere says Andy no it's got to be somewhere. That's a stack of Mac Minis. It is a little bit inconvenient.

0:42:03 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you know, like it's got to be somewhere. As someone who has a stack of Mac Minis, it is a little bit inconvenient. Yeah, you know, like it's, that's not. I mean, I don't really care.

I know that people were talking about the charger at the bottom of the mouse or whatever. I was kind of like. You know, I don't think about that ever. Like you know, like you put it in for lunch and walk away and come back Two months later you do this again. Um, but, but, the but, the uh, the power on the bottom is a little bit of a bummer, because I've got four of them stacked up and it's kind of like okay, now I'm gonna have to like, if I want to restart them, it's not as trivial, that's true yeah, it looks like it's the same, roughly same shape as the um.

0:42:38 - Leo Laporte
It's like a short mac studio, is that?

0:42:40 - Jason Snell
right, okay, so it's it's. It's two inches high and five by five, so it is half the size of the old Mac Mini in terms of volume and quite a bit larger than the Apple TV. People who are like oh, is it like an Apple TV.

0:42:52 - Alex Lindsay
It's like no, not really. It's not that small. It's probably not quite half Like. It's 70, it's 80 versus 50. It's a little bit more than half, I mean it gets taller.

0:43:10 - Jason Snell
It's like oh, I think it's 100 square inches to down to 50 square inches. I think it's actually about exactly half the volume of the mac we can check I.

0:43:14 - Alex Lindsay
I volume is weird, right, because you're losing a lot in two of the dimensions.

I, I did, I did the calculation. I think it's 80 versus 50, but but it might not be, so it's not quite half. Again, it feels like I was like, oh, it's half the. And then I actually typed, I actually did the math to figure out, like, is it really half the size? And I was like, well, and the reason I bring it up is that a lot of us are looking at it like hey, this would be great if we're going to have a higher density solution for our servers. And no, it's, you know. So like they completely just they definitely don't care about people using Mac Minis in a server environment.

0:43:48 - Leo Laporte
Like that was definitely not one of the things that they thought through in this process, because Mac Stadium uses a lot of them, right.

0:43:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we think that you could turn them sideways and stack eight of them sideways across a 3U, so the density would be marginally higher, but not a lot higher. And it's like one of those things like if it was a little shorter or a little smaller, like if it was just a little less on one dimension or another, we would get much higher density. But right now we're not and it is 85 versus 50.

0:44:19 - Jason Snell
So there you go, alex. So not quite half volume wise, but there, because it's slightly taller. Good math, good mathing, well done A gold star to you Mr. Lindsay, I know how to use a calculator.

0:44:28 - Alex Lindsay
I did math.

0:44:30 - Jason Snell
You know, the problem I had is that I, I, uh, I did not know how high the old one was, and it is a little taller right, but it's much it's much narrower now and it's it's that it's got a headphone jack, although it's on the front.

So depending on how you use your headphone jack, that could be more or less convenient. But I think it's great. It's five ports, including two on the front, which it was always like in these Johnny I days. It was heresy to put ports on the front, but they did it with a Mac studio so we knew it was.

0:45:03 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's also a great way to separate that some of them are USB-C, some of them are Thunderbolt, so you know, the ones in the back are the Tabasco ones. One of the front is for your keyboard.

0:45:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I do In a nod to American-made. They are an even 5x5x2 and some random amount of millimeters. It's like a two by four. It's not really two by four, but somebody, but somebody definitely decided that it had to be like, even like. It's really easy to remember what they are because they are like, because the last one was 1.41 high and this one is two it's five by five by two.

0:45:35 - Jason Snell
It's likea little teeny tiny. If it was, we could make it. If it's black, we can make it like a 2001 mini monolith. It takes you halfway to the end of time. Anyway, it's really interesting because it's a base model M4 but there's also the M4 Pro, which means this is the first time that we've seen that chip. The M4 Pro chip is, you know. It's got more cores. I think it's got 8 performance and 4.

0:46:01 - Alex Lindsay
The memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second.

0:46:05 - Jason Snell
This is the most, I would say the most surprising single thing.

0:46:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Four performance, six efficiency cores on the bottom line, eight performance and four efficiency cores on the Pro Chip.

0:46:13 - Jason Snell
Right, eight, four, and the idea there is that the 12 core is probably the full extent of the Pro Chip. Right, they have the bin versions, but that's the full extent of it, and a bunch of CPUs too. But the memory bandwidth, I think, is the real story here. With the M3 generation, when they rolled that out, we talked about it that it was curious that the Pro took a little step forward and then the Max took a big step forward, and of course, we don't know anything about the Max chip yet because maybe tomorrow right, what day is it? It's Tuesday. Well then, I don't know about other chips, but this one, like 75% generational improvement in memory bandwidth is huge, like that is a big step forward. So there was a small step forward for the Pro chip last time, but a huge step forward this time.

0:47:02 - Andy Ihnatko
It's more than twice as much I mean 120 gigabits per second on the m4, 273 gigabits per second on the m4 pro. They're clearly not as as much as they're making this, this cute little, like tiny little computer. They are clearly not marketing this as oh, here's the meet, meet maxi, your family, your cute little, tiny little pocketable mac. It is this.

0:47:25 - Leo Laporte
This is some serious crap and serious stuff here, and it's presumed that a studio will then be with the m4 max.

0:47:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah 400 gigs and the ultra is already 800 gigs, so so these are already. I mean, these are the m2s that are there. So if we see any kind of proportional increase in their speeds, wow.

0:47:45 - Leo Laporte
What does this?

0:47:45 - Alex Lindsay
memory bandwidth give you, alex, if you're moving a lot of data back and forth between things, you have to hold that data. It can be a huge stopper, especially with huge amounts of texture maps or massive amounts of video or massive amounts of scientific data or massive amounts of 3D data doing a variety of photogrammetry. All of these things kind of max out these systems as they start, you know, and it really becomes a churn. So again this gets back into what I was talking about. If I'm doing a bunch of effects on something in Resolve and I've got a bunch of 6K or 8K footage, that bandwidth gets saturated pretty quickly and so those are the kind of things that it will do.

Well, I think that again, it's not going to be. I mean, when you see these specs, you can't wait to see what the Studio and the Pro look like. You know like. But it's a really powerful machine. It's still not probably as powerful as you know. It's a really powerful machine. It's still not probably as powerful as I don't think the top of the line here is competitive with the Studio Ultra or Maxes, but I do think that it is extremely fast. I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck for power of any computer made right now.

0:49:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I hope that it keeps the same role that it had historically, where there's always. Historically there's always been. If you are a power user, but not necessarily someone who needs a Mac Pro, you can have the choice between buy a lower spec Mac Mini but then do a built-to-order and give it all the RAM you want, give it all the storage you want, give it all the extra you want, get the best processor you want, or go for a low-level, pro-level machine level machine. I hope that's still going to be kind of a distinction between the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini where, yeah, there's going to be a very clear jump to get to a Mac Studio including, I don't know, five displays instead of three Maybe a better fan. I'm assuming this Mac Mini has a fan Looking at the side of it.

It has vent holes in the bottom. Great, that was one small fear of mine that they would say well, we're going to have this throttled by heat performance so that we don't really so to make it fit in that tight little space. We're going to have it all naturally cooled. But it would have been weird to have the same sort of features into a MacBook Pro. That is absolutely going to have to have a fan. But yeah, I think this is. I'll speak for myself, I won't speak for you guys. It's the Mac Mini I definitely want and it's the one that can. Basically, I can kit out exactly how I want because I don't again, I don't need to spend $5,000 on the top of the line, anything. But I have certain needs and if I can suit them better with a 599 base model machine that I can then spec up to fifteen hundred dollars than I can with, say, a fifteen hundred dollar like pro level machine, I think they've got that it could support three displays um, which is nice.

0:50:55 - Leo Laporte
Also, support for DisplayPort over USB-C the pro. Actually it looks like the M4 and M4 Pro have the same video support. Yes, maybe a little bit higher resolution on the M4 Pro Display port 2.1 over USB-C HDMI up to 8K resolution over HDMI at 60 hertz hertz.

0:51:20 - Andy Ihnatko
4k at 240 mega 240 hertz wow, it's not just the displays, it's the fact that they these are multiple of really good displays.

0:51:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's pretty high yeah yeah, and thunderbolt 5.

0:51:32 - Jason Snell
I mean that's the other thing is it's, it's thunderbolt 5. So what is thunderbolt 5 thunderbolt 5 5 on the Pro chip, faster speeds Three times faster than Thunderbolt 4. Faster speeds more power and then you combine that with the video. Out is different because there are more GPUs. So you can do 6K at 60, or you know. So there's a little bit more there.

0:51:58 - Alex Lindsay
8k at 60.

0:51:59 - Jason Snell
It says 8K.

0:52:00 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, you can do one of each one. Two, yeah, yeah. And the um you uh, it's 120. I think it's up to 120 gig um pipeline 80 is the base um for it, and so it's. So. You're talking about being able to move 10 gigabytes um, theoretically 10 gigabytes um a second, which is twice as fast as my studio does internally. This gets into again if you're editing or you're trying to get in and out of things.

Being able to have something that has that kind of bandwidth is pretty exciting. And where this makes a difference for a Mac Mini is if you want to build a distributed rendering platform. So I want to have 10 of these able to do a bunch of distributed processing. The speed at which you can deliver that content to the thing that oftentimes is the biggest uh uh bottleneck that we get into is actually sending the frame. So let's say you want 10 of these to run compressor or you want 10 of these to run umD render. How fast can you get that data to the machine is a big deal, and being able to have this kind of speeds is pretty exciting.

And again, if you're editing something really heavy, a Mac Mini of this size with 64 gigs of RAM can absolutely do all the big editing that I was just talking about with six channels of 6k, but it's the drive speed that kills you, and so being able to have the new, you know, I imagine owc, within a couple months, will be delivering things that can do eight, you know, eight gigs or 10 gigabytes a second, and now you can stack up a lot of these things inside of whether it's resolve or final cut or others. Um, you can have a lot of really uncompressed data that you're working with. You don don't have to do any kind of you know, you don't have to burn anything in. Everything can be sitting there floating as you're working with it. So it's really it's exciting. It's exciting in a box, yeah.

0:53:52 - Leo Laporte
But obviously if it can do that, then you might want to wait and see what the studio will do. Will the studio be this week or no?

0:54:01 - Jason Snell
It'll be next year, next year mark german says mid next year, that it actually slipped a little bit, but it's really four computers, right. You've really got based on the four different chip models. You've got two Mac Minis and two mac studios, and I was thinking about this that I've got a mac studio now the, the base model, which has got the m1 uh max chip. And then there's also the ultra, and let's assume that they're going to do an ultra this generation for this. And then you've got the m4 and the m4 pro. Like where do you fall if you want a desktop system, and there will be, you know, maybe some crossover, but not in terms of the specs. You could spec up a Mac Mini pro chip with a bunch of ram and a bunch of storage and get it to be over what the starting price of the studio probably will be, but not with the specs that you want so I think 27.99 when I did.

0:54:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I mean I yeah, I was.

0:54:48 - Jason Snell
My price went for 25 or something like that. But the question is, who needs the higher end one like I? I'm not sure I need anything more than the than the m4 pro max more than the m1 max.

Let's be honest well, it's true, it's true. Actually, that's the truth of it. I, if I did, I would have ordered a pro mini today, and the fact is my m1 max max studio is still great, honestly, and and so probably I'll just wait and see what the what the studio holds, but it's nice that they offer exact thing.

These things, because m4 base model is super powerful and I know that it's got a little bit less storage than people would like and a little bit less ram, although it's got 16 now so that's good but but it's still an incredible value. And then with the pro chip you have got a very powerful system. I have a friend of mine who works from home and is a professional creative professional in the film industry and he texted me today and he was like bought a Mac Mini because he was. He had an old intel iMac that was on its last legs, and this is a serious professional person. So like it's a, it's a, it's an impressive product on both fronts so you can up.

0:55:55 - Leo Laporte
So let's see, let's start with the highest end. Start with the highest end Mac Mini, upgrade it to the m4 pro with 14 core cpu, 20 core gpu, 64 gigs of memory. That was 600 bucks. That's the apple premium right there, uh, and you can go up to eight terabytes of storage, but I think I'm gonna do two. Yeah, now we've got. This is the 2799. I don't need 10 gigabit Ethernet. Nice, though, alex, do you have 10 gigabit Ethernet?

0:56:23 - Alex Lindsay
No, I don't, but I'm probably going to Someday. Well, the bandwidth now coming into my house, I'm trying to get it all upgraded to 2.5 gigs Right. So at that point you start to think, oh, 1 gig. It starts to feel a little compressed. Now, and a reminder by the way, if you're in education, all those numbers go down a little bit. So if you're a student, the M4 is the base starts at $499.

0:56:51 - Leo Laporte
Wow, yeah, exactly, that's a great price for a very competitive computer.

0:56:57 - Andy Ihnatko
My kids are going to be so happy at Christmas.

0:56:59 - Leo Laporte
You would prefer this than a laptop for your kids.

0:57:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, because I mean the thing is is they do a lot of stuff at their house. They don't really spend a lot of time somewhere. If they do do it, I mean they both have monitors. The problem is is that I really like the problem with iMacs is dealing with the monitor and the machine. Like my daughter wants to make music it dealing with the monitor and the machine. Like my daughter wants to make music, it's easier for me to give her a Mac Mini with a monitor. She can kind of place wherever she wants and have the Mac Mini where it needs to be to get all the instruments in and everything else.

I find it very and again, as someone who has a lot of monitors I've got like nine monitors up here I I have a hard time understanding like, where would I put it?

I look at the iMac and I'm like, where would I put that? Like I don't like all of my monitors hang on on arms so that I can move them around and get them to where I want, and so when you get used to that lifestyle, it's really hard to go back Like and so the so having a computer that's sitting, that's contained and sitting on your desk seems like a really hard thing and again, I think, I think, unless you really are going to be on the road, having a laptop doesn't necessarily if you're using it at home all the time, doesn't necessarily make sense. So you're getting so much more bang for your buck from these Mac Minis with a monitor. You can go out and buy a. I mean, of course you can get a nice monitor and then you're paying about the same amount. But I have, I get, I have one nice monitor that I can do color correction on. The rest of them are these cheap, you know, $150, 1080p, 24, $1080p 24-inch.

0:58:19 - Andy Ihnatko
They work great. Not only that, but we're forgetting that there's almost a community of people that are like iPad Pro or even iPad Mini users, that essentially travel with a Mac Mini as a headless Mac and they use their iPad as a display for that.

0:58:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting.

0:58:35 - Andy Ihnatko
That's going to make this even better, and the fact that the power supply is completely integrated. That's good news and bad news. It's obviously good news because it's just one simple cable you can replace for like 10 bucks if you lose it or if you want multiples of them. When we were talking about this a while ago, like oh, it would be great if they made like an Apple TV-sized Mac Mini, my fantasy would be that it would be powered by, like power delivery over USB, so that in certain scenarios I could just like power it with a power brick and just have that completely. But it's going to make all those people really, really happy too.

0:59:08 - Alex Lindsay
I really wanted it to be that way, because in our school in Africa the number one thing that dies is the power supply. So we ended up with a bunch of PCs because it was too hard to fix them. Imax, like. We started off with 40 iMacs and over 10 years ended up with a bunch of PCs, because it was just as the iMacs died one after the other. With the PCs we just replaced the power supply. So I was hoping to see it go to a USB-C the same way you had it, because A you could also power theoretically with some of these bricks you could power two or three of these iMacs or Mac Minis at one time. But also, if it blows out the power supply, you just buy another one. Yeah.

0:59:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Right. Even so, though, I mean it must have gotten really close. I mean, the power on the specs page consumes less than 150 watts. Right, and that's amazing. I mean, when I look at like even compact, like compact Windows PCs, they start at 300 watts. And stuff with this kind of power, if you don't limit yourself to tiny, tiny little nut-sized devices, 500 watts is almost the minimum that they consider to be a decent power supply for anything of any power. So this is an amazing accomplishment to get it to work in under those circumstances and I bet it very rarely gets to 155, sure that's.

I'm sorry, that's maximum.

1:00:27 - Leo Laporte
It's probably operating at half of that or less. Uh, very quiet too. They say five dba at idle, which is basically silent, even though it doesn't.

1:00:36 - Andy Ihnatko
And they're saying they're saying the first carbon free, completely carbon free, mac. I think they're saying, yeah, first carbon neutral, carbon neutral sorry.

1:00:40 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, that means they're saying the first carbon-free, completely carbon-free Mac, I think they're saying yeah, first carbon neutral, carbon neutral.

1:00:43 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, that means they're buying credits, though, right, exactly.

1:00:46 - Jason Snell
No, it's a combination. They changed the way they manufactured it and they remember their power is all not credits. Their power is all green and they're using its 50% recycled materials in there. Yes, good job. And there's a lot less aluminum because they say they're using a new process that uses much less aluminum than old processes did. So, yeah, it's just all part of the story. This is, I mean, literally 14 years since they redesigned the enclosure of the Mac Mini the last time.

1:01:16 - Andy Ihnatko
So it's about time for this. Also, we're all now very aware that when you make it smaller all the great reasons that we like things that are smaller, including being able to velcro it to the back of a display but also that means that you can get more Mac Minis per master case, more master cases per shipping container and now fewer shipping containers, so it'll cost less to ship yeah, what about?

1:01:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean, one reason people do buy pcs is for discrete graphics cards. What about graphics performance, alex? Do you have an opinion? Are they keeping up? Are they catching? Catching, not keeping up?

1:01:43 - Alex Lindsay
catching up For the vast majority of the audience. Absolutely. You know the graph, the integrated graphics. When you start looking at that memory, the memory bandwidth is really high compared to bus bandwidth, as well, as you know, being integrated with the CPU, so it's a different problem because you can cut these things If you're building it for the computer. The way that you use the CPUs and GPUs is very different than the way you would use a discrete GPU.

Now, for some of the stuff that I do, we still need NVIDIA and AMD cards. So it is like I have things that we do that we need three or four of them in one computer. I can't do that with, you know. Obviously we can't do that right now with any of the Macs. So you know, there is a world that needs more than what the Macs can do.

When you're talking about a Mac Mini or you're talking about these things, I think that the performance is very, very good for 99% of the market, you know, and I think that there is a 1% of markets that's going to still keep on buying Linux or PCs because they need more dedicated and specific hardware. Yeah, but I think that has to more. By the way, I think that has more to do with how the apps are written than what the computer can do. So when we talk to app developers who write from the ground up and they write to the metal literally so when they're writing to metal, they're taking full advantage of all of Apple's APIs. The performance is outrageous on these machines. It's where people don't want to commit that much and they just want to port code. Do what they did before, use the old ways of doing things, that you need a lot more horsepower. So it just depends on how much they dedicate their code to what Apple is proposing in the infrastructure that Apple is providing.

1:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Metal's good. Metal's good, but you need to write to it.

1:03:37 - Alex Lindsay
Right, you need to. I mean again, with any operating system. The more you abstract from what the operating system wants, whether that's windows or linux or or apple, the less performance you're going to get out of that hardware you're going to. You're going to just need to, you know, because a lot of people are essentially lazy, you know, and I mean lazy, I don't mean lazy like they're laying around, it's just that they don't want to.

You've've got a lot of those things Just lying around but they don't want to do that If, when you talk to you know, like you know, a good example is like Zoom Dedicate. They have dedicated apps for every single platform. Right, you know, and it's written to take full advantage of every platform that they're interacting with and it feels it's why Zoom runs so much smoother than all the other video conferencing apps is because they're writing something and they're not trying to abstract anything. You know they're taking full advantage of each platform and so that's a good example. You see that anywhere in an app and that's why a lot of times, we like to work with Mac-only apps, because we know that that developer is developing for the platform that I'm using, not trying to figure out how we get the same code to work on three different platforms and that's, you know, cause that's never going to be as good as writing it straight to the. You know, straight to the, the OS is native.

1:04:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're watching Mac break weekly. The big Apple week continues. Jason Snell is here Thursday. He'll be covering the Apple quarterly results at sixcolors.com, his blog with his world famous patented colored charts. Uh, are you going to do one for Halloween like an orange and black chart? You?

1:05:09 - Jason Snell
know, oh, it's an interesting idea, but uh, probably not.

1:05:14 - Leo Laporte
Thank you uh, Alex Lindsay is also here. Office hoursglobal. Do you do a Halloween show for office hours? No, no, you don't dress in costume and not a really a different, a different thing kind of guy like you know I.

1:05:30 - Alex Lindsay
I know you're very consistent yeah, I don't have a lot of uh, so so I don't really shift, shift you, although.

1:05:37 - Leo Laporte
I do know you've added an iMac to your display behind you.

1:05:40 - Alex Lindsay
Is that a Keeping Up with the Joneses thing? Not an?

1:05:43 - Leo Laporte
iMac, a Macintosh, an old Macintosh.

1:05:45 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, you got a.

1:05:45 - Leo Laporte
Bondi Blue iMac.

1:05:46 - Alex Lindsay
I got a Bondi. This is a 24p Bondi Blue. It was hand-built for movies. This one here is the old one, the old Mac Classic. I've got some elemental plates.

1:06:02 - Leo Laporte
I have the elemental plates. After you said that, we said we apparently russell had scavenged the plates swimming the orange ones, though which?

1:06:10 - Alex Lindsay
is oh, is that good or bad? Yeah, a lot of us were a little upset about the whole orange plate thing. Um, you know we were like this kids was a 25 000 machine I just want to point out, not to show off, but each one of those plates was 130 000.

1:06:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god, and we've effectively replaced it with in software in the cloud.

1:06:32 - Alex Lindsay
Basically right the ones that we're. We used to need this to stream to though a variety of platforms uh, the ones, the ones that I had were still pretty competitive, you know like, even though they don't even make them anymore, but 16 inputs with 32 individual streams is still pretty powerful. But yeah, so that's what those were. I got the cube up here.

1:06:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so yeah, oh, you've got some good.

1:07:00 - Alex Lindsay
Macs. I like to you know it's my, it's my wall of depreciation, everything here used to be worth a lot of money with the new Mac Minis.

1:07:07 - Leo Laporte
They'll be too small to even notice up there you wouldn't even see they're out of focus. They'd be like we got flying toasters running on our uh, on our mac classic johnson.

1:07:16 - Alex Lindsay
My mac classic doesn't work. I have to go. I have like this is actually a 128K Mac.

1:07:21 - Leo Laporte
This is the original and it didn't work. The floppy didn't work, so John bought a device that you can plug into the floppy port that emulates a hard drive.

1:07:32 - Alex Lindsay
I keep on looking, I go I should just put an iPad in there. Like, just put an iPad.

1:07:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was going to cut out a piece of white paper and just put flying toasters on, but no, we got the scan work and everything. That's awesome. I love it. Uh also, uh, Andy inako, when are you gonna be on gbh next?

1:07:51 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, I was already on uh last week, but you can catch me again in about two weeks time. Uh, the week before thanksgiving, I think thursday before thanksgiving at 12 30.

1:07:58 - Leo Laporte
yeah, can't wait. Uh, before we move on to apple intelligence, I would like to know, Jason, what's going to be tomorrow, thursday and friday. What's apple going to announce?

1:08:12 - Jason Snell
well, mark german mentioned macbook pros and we haven't seen them, so process of elimination that would be be tomorrow. Apple results on Thursday.

1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
So they won't do a product on Thursday.

1:08:24 - Jason Snell
I don't think so. And then Friday, free space. I think nothing, because then it's November and we'll all be recovering for Halloween.

1:08:30 - Alex Lindsay
Well, that's a short week. I think it's just Monday.

1:08:33 - Jason Snell
Tuesday.

1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
Wednesday and then the quarterlies. I am really tempted to buy a Mac Mini. Like you, I have an m1 uh pro or, yeah, maybe a max.

1:08:45 - Jason Snell
It was there an ultra m1 ultra yeah, yeah, okay, so lisa, there was, I know I got lisa the next one up, so she has the ultra, I have the max yep, um, but it's, it's.

1:08:57 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I play valheim on it, it's just fine, I don't. I don't feel like it's slow or anything, but this would be twice as fast, wouldn't it?

1:09:06 - Alex Lindsay
uh, probably yeah, yeah better graphic documents will be so quick keynote will work great.

1:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't need it. It's I. There's no justification for it, but it's so cute, I, you know I. I think that one thing that's missing.

1:09:17 - Alex Lindsay
I was thinking about it and I was like how do you take full advantage of I, you know, I, I think that one thing that's missing. I was thinking about it and I was like, how do you take full advantage of this? Um, and I think that you know you could. When we're talking about encoding, you could build a piece of software that did really good, simple encoding that used one of these little for 600 you could definitely do 4k, 60, you know, hdr, kind of things just have it running in the background all the time.

Yeah, I mean there's a. I don't know if it's on Mac or not, but you know AWS now has released the software that they use for their links to ingest into AWS, and I was thinking about you know you can port it over Maybe a great little Plex server, the least expensive one, I mean the power of the Mac Mini for me has been that I modularize everything. So I've got a bunch of them and they all do their own little jobs that they do really well.

1:10:06 - Leo Laporte
Do you give them little names Like Huey, Dewey?

1:10:09 - Alex Lindsay
One's called Prezo and the other one's called Zoom and the other one's called. You know what they do, but they do have their names on the front, so I know which one.

1:10:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, you have to. One thing that I actually thought was kind of interesting. So they didn't have like. Either they have these big events in which they send the drones out to dive bomb the Apple campus and take those wonderful establishing shots, or they have like a non-event where they just do like a product video and they release that. This time both for the iMac and for the Mac Mini. They did something in between. They did like a 10 minute version of the dive bombing the campus yeah, campus and having it looked like. It looked like it could have been part of a larger event. I know I'm sure it wasn't, but I thought that was an interesting middle ground for that.

1:10:54 - Leo Laporte
Actually, I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask you, alex, about this. I wanted to ask Alex about this because it looked like the little characters are those real, these little characters running around?

1:11:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's a tilt shift lens. It's tilt shift, is it? Because it looks like tilt?

1:11:10 - Leo Laporte
shift. It looks very cute. They did something really cute with it, which is not only a tilt shift, but it's time-lapse tilt shift, right, yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty cool it.

1:11:20 - Alex Lindsay
But it's time-lapse tilt shift, right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. It does, it creates a great effect. We've used it a lot for openings and for shows.

1:11:25 - Leo Laporte
Can we not show it? Is that why you're not showing it? It's a Stephen Colbert, John Ashley. Am I going to get taken down if I show it? No, you don't put the sound on and you show it and you crop it down by 25% and put it over something it'll never get. Yeah, you say that I'm wondering. I feel like just look at it because it's cute.

1:11:49 - Andy Ihnatko
It's cute anyway. Yeah, it's cute. No, can I say, make a suggestion, something we should have standing by. We should have like a cheap 1080p HD monitor, hdmi, we should smear like Vaseline over it and every time we want to like show an Apple video, will this basically have a camera pointing at that and so we can at least content ID be fooled by that.

1:12:07 - Leo Laporte
You think, uh just for people who are going. What are they talking about? We get taken down instantly. We get strikes. I mean they, they're serious about us. Um, you might see it on other platforms, but for some, reason uh, youtube twitch, we get strikes I, I think that you know.

1:12:24 - Alex Lindsay
To get back to the, the announcement, I think that app, while apple probably was one of the key companies to bring keynotes, to make keynotes what they are today, with steve jobs, I think they're in the process of disassembling that right now, which is that, you know, these shows, this is so this not this is a new strategy.

1:12:42 - Leo Laporte
This is not just for this.

1:12:43 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't know if it's a new strategy, but it sure feels like it and I think that it's great. You know like and I. I even wonder why you need to do three in a week. I think they could have done iMac two weeks ago and the Mac Mini last week.

1:13:01 - Jason Snell
And the and the. There is some buzz with saying Apple is doing an event and people to tune in to see what it is, and you get them all in one place. The disadvantage is, if you are going to tell a story about three Macs, somebody is just going to like there's going to be a headline about one of them and instead there are headlines about each of them every day. So I mean you just you pick your poison, I guess, but I think this is a good setup.

1:13:18 - Alex Lindsay
I think that you could get to a point where Apple's releasing something every month. You just have a little 10-minute video about something new that they released, and then you still have the big ones. That are the iPhone.

1:13:29 - Jason Snell
You have to do the iPhone announcement you have to yeah, yeah, yeah and the world will tune in for that and WWDC makes sense, but the others don't necessarily have to be anything but this. My one criticism of what they have done this week is that the videos seem super low-key, like the video should be much more easy to spot on apple's website. They are posting them to youtube, which is great, and to social media, but, like, if you go to applecom, yesterday there was not like a way to watch the iMac video directly, and today is the same with the Mac Mini video, and even when you go to the page about the Mac Mini, the video doesn't show up. It's like a little thing that says watch the video.

And it's super subtle and I like.

1:14:05 - Alex Lindsay
I don't like that I wonder if they're pushing people to YouTube, because I didn't even think about watching on the Apple site. I went straight to YouTube. I was like, okay, let's go to the Apple page. I doubt Apple wants to push people to YouTube.

Maybe, but I think that building up the YouTube presence isn't necessarily bad for Apple. Oh no, that's where everybody watches, right? I will say that I do think that they should stream these. I know that they recorded them and they're playing them out, but creating like a little event that streams them out live, it's a lot more expensive, I will say. But I think that you know, we would have stopped and watched it live if it was live, if it was a schedule, and so you know, I think that there's a unified experience.

Maybe they're going to save that for WWDC and for the iPhones, but I do think this makes so much more sense. I mean, they're making their case in 10 minutes. It's more compact. We get all the information that we want. I keep on looking at it going. They're shooting this on iPhones, like you know, like because want. I keep on looking at going. They're shooting this on iphones, like you know, like because they see at the end they go like all shot with an iphone and you're like holy smokes, like you don't think about it anymore, like at first you thought about it and I didn't think about it until I saw the disclaimer is there a tilt?

shift for the iphone now you can do tilt, shift style with anything, any footage, it's a filter so you can yeah, you can, you can, you can make it look, you know, make it look like that just showing my age.

1:15:21 - Leo Laporte
I used to have a lens that you would kind of angle and do these things and they'd be little tweak tweakers?

1:15:27 - Alex Lindsay
no, it's, you can have it. It's a kind of a, it's a way that the focus works, but that can be definitely rebuilt. But the the um, I do think that I'm not sure that, uh, there's one space that they're talking and like when they announce the Mac Mini. I don't think that that exists. Like I space that they're talking in, like when they announced the Mac Mini, I don't think that that exists, like I think that they've made up a space for those, that part of the that's the.

1:15:45 - Jason Snell
that's the observatory. That's their new location that they just built. That's next to the Steve Jobs yeah.

1:15:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that, actually. That actually finished that just before, like the big iPhone event, some some style it's cool architectural magazine actually got an exclusive look at it. I was wondering what that space is going to be used for yeah, and at first I thought that it was a telescope.

1:16:05 - Alex Lindsay
Some of it.

1:16:06 - Jason Snell
I saw like little white edges.

1:16:07 - Alex Lindsay
So I thought that it might be uh, comped. You know it might be like a green screen but there's too much movement and if you're doing it with an iphone, I just don't think I would. I think I would probably do all of those um, or most of them. There's definitely some effects you know off in there. Um, but, um, but it was, uh, it's really. They're really doing a good job at um dog fooding their phones, you know, for for shooting, you know it's, it's kind of an amazing.

1:16:32 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I don't think anybody else is doing that, you know, or or trying to, yeah, uh, by the way, thanks to n2 tech in our youtube channel, who says so, you said that the new Mac Mini is five by five.

1:16:44 - Andy Ihnatko
The apple tv 4k is 3.66 by 3.66 inches, so it is bigger than an apple tv so you can make a little pyramid with the original you could do a tower of hanoi mini, the new Mac Mini and the apple tv exactly and then you're right.

1:17:00 - Leo Laporte
Then your iPod, your iPod just case gives me your airpods case yeah speaking of airpods, so 18 one came out on Monday.

I did want to compare the hearing aid experience on airpod pro versus actual hearing aids, and I did and I quickly went back to my actual hearing aids. And I did, and I quickly went back to my actual hearing aids. I'm a big fan of the idea of over-the-counter hearing aids and inexpensive hearing aids because most people, when they see the price tag and a lot of insurance policies do not cover hearing aids and they see it's going to cost them thousands of dollars, say, yeah, I don't need them that bad and people should have hearing aids who have hearing loss. It really makes a difference in quality of life but also in cognitive decline. I am a big believer, also going in an audiologist, but I did the test on the phone. Apple said that I had no hearing loss, so that wasn't so great. Yeah, that wasn't great. That's not great, but nevertheless it gave me a curve with a little hearing loss. So and I applied it I realized that the big, what the big difference is.

So with real hearing aids, even some of the over a cat the counter hearing aids you have a thing behind your ear that's the battery and the logic and the microphone and then a little tiny piece that comes with a clear tube and goes in your ear. It doesn't block your ear. So when you're wearing hearing aids, like my Otakons and I've worn Starkies and Rezounds as well you hear everything that's going around, naturally, because it still goes into your ear hole. The little speaker that you put in there is amplifying the speech frequencies so you can understand speech better. That's all it's doing, and when I put in the AirPods it seals my ear and so, as a result, I don't get ambient sounds except through the AirPods microphone. So it is a very different experience. It's a little bit isolating because I'm now hearing only what the microphone hears.

It is inevitably a little process. It's a little different than just hearing the real sound, and I didn't like it. I felt like it was plugging up my ears. Now I wear in-ear monitors that do plug up my ears, so it's not that, and I like AirPods for listening to music, but as a day-to-day hearing aid, I I prefer, uh, my regular hearing aids. Um, having said that, the apples did exactly what a hearing aid would do it amplified the speech, it was smart about where you're looking and did a lot of really cool, uh, computational audio, uh and again, if you don't very good for somebody who only wants to spend 250 dollars or someone who only can thousand dollars you know they don't if they don't have the money to buy those.

1:19:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think that these are going to be great replacements. I think there's not going to be a lot of other things at $250 or even $500 if you get two pairs of them.

1:19:51 - Leo Laporte
So I'm all for it because I think it really is important that people and I think people get used to the idea that you're wearing AirPods when you talk to people. We'll just know that you're using them as hearing aids, not listening to your favorite podcast instead of paying attention. So I think it's good. But I would say that there is very much of a difference between audiologists prescribed hearing aids. My audiologist does a lot more than just the beep boop test. I mean there's all I've done, I think three or four tests and then when you get the hearing aids they have, it's really interesting. They play back speech in a variety of languages and and measure what they're the hearing aids getting and tune it all the frequencies. They do a whole bunch of stuff that you just can't, you're not going to do in a 250 hearing aid.

So there is an advantage to going to an audiologist and buying hearing aids. There's a huge disadvantage it's very expensive and it's much better than nothing to have airpods. So that's my review for what it's worth. Um, and if you, if you know, if you're a hearing aid user, you should continue to use your hearing aids, because that is that is probably a better experience. It is for me for sure, all right, let's talk about 18.1 and I guess, Jason, you said there's two because they're. They also released the betas for 18 for 18.2, which is second wave.

1:21:10 - Jason Snell
So we basically got the first wave of apple intelligence has gone out to everybody this week and the second wave has gone out as a developer beta, which again I think Apple's being really clever here, of kind of you know, when they put out the iPhone they also put out a public beta of the first wave of Apple intelligence, so they couldn't be accused of not making it available at least in some form if you wanted to get it. And now, when you talk about the first wave shipping, you also sort of need to talk about the second wave which we've seen, because it's actually shipping in a way as developer beta. So they they're trying to broaden, like what is in apple intelligence as they go, so that there are a whole bunch of new features. In fact it's a, I think, a much more impressive collection of things in the 0.2 developer beta than what shipped in 0.1. 0.1 is very mild.

I think what I've noticed, especially on social media in the last day or so, is we cover this stuff closely, right, we watch it, we think about it, we talk about it here, but the vast majority of people don't. They see those ads, they see the branding for Apple Intelligence and then they update to 18.1 where it's like welcome to Apple Intelligence, and what I've noticed is a large number of deep misunderstandings about what's going on. That I don't blame the people for. I really blame Apple for misinforming them about it. The one that I keep seeing more than anything else is even some reasonably well-informed people who say, oh great, apple intelligence is here with 0.1. I'm going to try out Siri and see if Siri's any better.

1:22:48 - Leo Laporte
And what can I tell you?

1:22:50 - Jason Snell
It's not Like the better Siri stuff. Siri's better at one very specific thing, which is, if you sort of stammer, stumble over your words, correct yourself. It will be better at understanding what you're saying. But in terms of querying sources and understanding what's on your screen and stuff like that, that Apple has promised, that's not going to happen. A lot of that stuff's not going to happen until next spring. So I think this is Apple reaping what it sows a little bit in terms of over-promising what's in Apple intelligence right now and people may be misunderstanding it and thinking that this is a done deal and it's all baked in there, when in fact it's. You know, point one, it's summaries and some writing tools and and not even the image generation stuff, because that's coming in point two. So it's a. It's a very light Apple intelligence debut and that's okay. It's, it's fine.

1:23:38 - Andy Ihnatko
It's. I think notably it's the harmless features, the ones that are like notification summaries, which, in itself, people who've been testing them have had certain feelings about, but we're not talking about. They're not introducing any image editing tools. They're not introducing any like take over do your job for you, do your homework for you tools. It really is baby steps. They're very, very content.

Craig Federighi actually Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal posted a 20-minute interview with Craig Federighi about Apple intelligence. Clearly they really want to get that, messaging out that this is not the finished feature. This is just the first thing that we're releasing on a long continuum of features. For heaven's sake, they're still calling it beta. Technically speaking, there is a waiting list for features. I mean, for heaven's sake, they're still calling it beta and technically speaking, there is a waiting list for it.

You know it's not activated immediately. I mean to be fair, it only took like I was expecting. Oh gosh, maybe I downloaded it yesterday. I was thinking, oh God, I hope I have a time to take. They approved me for it before like Tuesday show and I got in in like an hour or two. But they're not expecting everybody to be using this aggressively immediately, nor are they prepared to. But they also know that it's not like BlackBerry and Microsoft and Android having to react to the presence of the first multi-touch iPhone on the market where they know that, okay, doom is coming on a swift horse. We need to actually get things out really, really quickly. Ai is going to have some sort of an impact. It's going to power some features that people are certainly going to expect in their phone, but it's not going to drive sales really for at least another couple of years until everyone figures out what the table stakes are for ai on a mobile device so when I put 18.1 on there, I did not get a pop-up or anything.

1:25:29 - Leo Laporte
So, uh, I realized, oh, I don't, I still don't have it. So I there is a new entry for apple intelligence in the settings, and I asked for it just like literally five minutes ago and it's now preparing it. So there, the wait is not long.

1:25:43 - Andy Ihnatko
It's weird. I got the. I got the pop-up on my ipad.

1:25:45 - Leo Laporte
I did not get the pop-up on my mac, which was kind of weird yeah, I haven't seen it on the mac either, so I didn't get it anywhere. But interestingly, I uh applied for it on the phone and we're looking at my ipad and it says preparing as well. So I think I think.

1:25:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I think once they approve you for one device, you get access to it for the entire Apple account. When I was approved on the iPad, it immediately appeared on my Mac as well.

1:26:09 - Leo Laporte
So I was hoping that I could like you, andy. I was hoping I could play with it on camera here, but I guess I'll let you guys play with it. The story in the Wall Street Journal Joanna Stern says Apple intelligence isn't very smart yet and Apple's okay with that. Are they really okay with that? Yeah, exactly.

1:26:29 - Jason Snell
They have to be.

1:26:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they're saying a lot of things that are a signature for them, which is very positive, which is we don't have a. We're not like Google, we're not like OpenAI, where we are trying to build an entire industry based on artificial intelligence. Those two companies they have plans that go way beyond a smart assistant on your phone or autocomplete text on your phone, which is pretty much what Apple seems to be leading themselves to. Let's add features to this specific line of Apple products. Google wins if they become the render farm, the compute farm for artificial intelligence applications and research. So that's the game that they're playing. Apple realizes that they can play the slow game and actually no one's going to complain to them about saying, oh well, we're being very, very conservative Meanwhile. So they're technically, yes, you could say they're behind, but they're also not getting a whole bunch of alarming press coverage about stupid things that their latest product did in the AI space, like some other companies that we could easily talk about.

There was one of the most interesting things in the Craig Federighi piece was that even when it comes to image editing, he said that they're being very, very conservative. There was a lot of discussion about like. I mean, there are things that are really just instinctively cool and applicable and makes sense to a lot of people, which is again. I got a picture of my kid at Disney World. Unfortunately, there was a guy in the background with a Party Naked t-shirt on and I really don't want to have that in the background. It's cool when you're using Adobe Lightroom or using a Google product. You just simply tap on the guy and he simply disappears and is filled in with more Disneyland. But Craig was saying we're worried about what is the truth of the picture and should we be responsible for altering the truth of the picture?

1:28:30 - Leo Laporte
Interestingly, Gemini on the Pixel 9 does allow you to completely alter the picture with fantasy. That's something Google does. Apple's decided they don't want to do that.

1:28:43 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's also perfectly legitimate. I mean, just because they don't do it doesn't mean that it's a thing if they prohibit an Adobe app from doing that on the iPhone, that's. I mean, there's also a big component of Apple Intelligence where ChatGPT is. If the Apple Intelligence can't handle something and wants to send something out to ChatGPT, it'll send something out to ChatGPT. Isn't that really really Romulan-like in cleverness where they're basically saying that anything that could be really really controversial, that could get us in trouble, we're happy to let somebody else do that and you can blame them for that. Meanwhile, we'll give you some warnings about sending something out to chat GPT and then our hands are clean.

1:29:22 - Leo Laporte
Interestingly, this is literally five minutes later. It's now saying okay, you've got it.

1:29:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the wait's not very long. I mean, you're mostly just downloading the models there.

1:29:32 - Leo Laporte
Why are they even doing that then?

1:29:34 - Jason Snell
Okay, so they're having you download the models and I think they also want to function.

To gate this in the models and I think they also want to function to gate uh, this in case there are issues cases, especially since some of their stuff is on the cloud server and if they feel overwhelmed they can limit the people coming in to get apple intelligence. So they've got a few ways of kind of like controlling it. But you do also have to download the models, and so that's part of the process and and that happens afterward. What's happening with the developer beta is really interesting. The people who downloaded that right away and asked for access to the image generation tools. Many of them got them, but everybody since then has not gotten access to them. I haven't heard. I think Micah maybe got access the other day, but I still don't have it. Very few people I know even have it. So there is something going on in the developer beta side where they are being a little more limited in rolling those features out to devices, which is also interesting.

1:30:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was pretty quick. There was a few things it's going to do and that's it. The summaries might be good. Are they good? Did they do a good job?

1:30:37 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean they're're not perfect, but they're good, they're very helpful. Sometimes you get apps that really spam you with summaries or with notifications and it in. If you've got like a smart door lock and it says like the door opened and closed, and opened and closed and closed, it will say, uh, the door opened and closed a lot, it most recently closed at this time, and so that's which is all you really need to know, right? Or? Or for me, it it was my home irrigation controller, where it was like the irrigation system ran and then it concluded at this time, and that's all I needed to know and I didn't need to know more than that.

1:31:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I like that. I think that's actually much needed, yeah not 100% perfect.

1:31:10 - Jason Snell
Sometimes it gets it wrong, but I would say more useful than not.

1:31:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and just the simple ability to say here's a whole bunch of text I don't have time to read right now. Please summarize it for me so I can prioritize what I will actually read. That is like taking the party naked guy, T-shirt guy from the background of a Disney World picture. That's another one of those things that is immediately relevant to so many people. Those little things, they work fine too. And also, let's not forget that they're probably gating access also, because for a lot of the features that are not being done on a device, that's all being done on Apple servers, on Apple's custom Apple Silicon and their private security system. That means that they can't just simply buy more compute if they are being overloaded at any one time. They have to buy more land they have to get more servers up and running.

1:31:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see if Apple starts to do like the notebook lm. Stuff that google's doing is just mind-bogglingly good. Like just just mind-bogglingly good. Yeah, did you see meta?

1:32:07 - Leo Laporte
last week released their version of it and it sounds crappy. It's like well, I don't do it I'm not even talking about uh the podcast podcast thing. Oh okay, um, just in general talking about. You take a bunch of documents, you throw them in there and start having natural conversations with them and you're just like what I've been a fan of this for some time. This is right, and this is all there for apple.

1:32:29 - Jason Snell
It's all there for apple to to do right, like they can connect you know notes or notes with different tags or whatever. Like imagine apple building all that in in their system. But it's going to take that's probably a next cycle kind of thing for them because they're still getting up to speed. But there's, there's still good stuff, like in in point one.

1:32:48 - Alex Lindsay
I mean we should mention writing tools, because writing tools is in point one and although it doesn't write for you or it doesn't start, right, you know, like it's some it seems like it'll rewrite things for you, but it it's not like going, it's not like chat, gpt, like write me a thing, right, but you know um in point two it does.

1:33:04 - Jason Snell
Let you do that using chat. Gpt but, in point one, it doesn't. But still, as a writer, I can tell you everything I write gets worse when I put it through writing tools. But that is not surprising, right?

1:33:15 - Alex Lindsay
Because I'm actually a writer and I do this for a little bit, but the truth is, lots and lots of people struggle with the written word.

1:33:22 - Jason Snell
People who are very smart, but that writing never came naturally to them and they feel very uncomfortable. And there are also a lot of people for whom English is not their primary language or their first language, and so it's not about the people that are like above the bar and above average.

It's about the people who really struggle getting more confidence to know that the software that comes on their Mac or on their iPhone can make sure that what they're writing makes sense or is professional or anything like that. And I think that we need to acknowledge that, because it would be very easy to poo-poo it and say, oh, this is a silly feature, but actually I think it'll be a big deal for a lot of people and my kids. You know my kids can't write a professional email or cover letters. To save their lives and you know that's one of the advantages of using this is, instead of sending their text to me to vet, you press the professional button and it looks better. Also, a friend of mine pointed out, if you're really mad at somebody and you're sending them an angry email, if you can just stop long enough to go. You know, please make this nice.

1:34:23 - Alex Lindsay
It just back off a little, just back on the nicer make nicer button is really great and and the the um there's an actual make nicer button. Oh yeah, friendly, they call it way more friendly, friendly smiley face yeah, exactly, and and I think that, um, it brings you towards the mean right. And so the issue is if you're below the mean, it's great, and if you're above the mean, it's not as great.

1:34:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, because LLMs are all about flattening everything to the average right.

They're basically the mean To the average, and that's why they're the cliched and they're kind of boring and they're kind of obvious. But if you struggle with writing and I really know judgment here my dad was an incredibly smart guy and I mean he couldn't write to save his life, he just couldn't. I remember him writing things down on a notepad and I'd be like what is this? Because I was always super verbal. Like, for people like that, who are then then put in a in a situation where they have to send an email for their job or they have to send a text, and it's very important and they have, they're completely at sea to be able for the os just built in to throw them a life preserver and say, well, and we can help you, is a big deal there's a lot of things that are give to caesar.

1:35:27 - Alex Lindsay
What is caesar's like? You know, like I write a lot of proposals and there's got to be a cover letter you know for it and they won't accept it if you don't have a cover letter. But no one reads the cover letter. But it has to be reasonably good. Yeah, it has to cover the things that you need to say or whatever.

And I just say I just tell chat GPT write me a cover letter. These are the highlights. This is the thing I wanted to be formatted with the address and blah blah, and it'll ask me questions If you don't know what I'm, what you, what you're, what you're supposed to do. It asked me a couple of questions and boom, there's a cover letter. Can make an executive summary.

1:35:53 - Jason Snell
Essentially it's called like make it a bulleted list or something like that, but it's an executive summary. We know what. We know what that feature is. That feature is for for an executive, a boss that you're working for, who fancies himself so important that I'm not going to read paragraphs just give it to me in a bulleted list.

And so it makes a bulleted list. And so it makes a bulleted list with little bold face points, with colons, and then, like a little one-liner about it, it is making an executive summary and again, you should look and make sure it actually summarizes the points you want. But it's kind of brilliant where you're like okay, do you as a, as a worker, need to wade through a four-page document and generate an executive summary?

1:36:38 - Leo Laporte
how do you do that? You, you, uh, you have it in a text, so you might, if it's a.

1:36:43 - Jason Snell
She did this with her interview with federighi and presumably, yeah, you use whispery or something to transcribe you select and you choose, uh, writing tools, and then, in this case, you it's create, it's called create key points, and I mean they might as well be create learnings.

Right it is.

It is for the boss who wants bullet points, but it will do that so you can generate a summary or create key points, and it's really smart.

So in point two to Alex's point, not only in point two can you just write anything and it will say I will use chat, gpt and give you something back, but you can also they're opening it up in point two where you can give it particular nuance.

So instead of saying this, all these pre-baked things, make it friendly, make it more professional you can also say, like, in the box you can click and type make this a little bit funny, but not too funny, or make this have some puns in it or whatever, and it will do that. So you don't have to be limited to the pre-baked stuff. If you've got a pre-baked Because in the end, it's not so much about Apple controlling it, I think, with the pre-baked as it being something that I believed for a long time, which is anytime somebody with an LLM tells you look, it's everybody's favorite interface, a blinking cursor in a blank box that you have to type with something to coerce it to do something. It's like I really like the idea that there's a professional button and a happy button, but they are letting you. If you have a very specific need in point two, you can actually do that.

1:38:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and go ahead. I'm sorry, go ahead, andy. I was just going to say that it's so much fun to be our age and be able to see the transition between what marks you as someone who's really really good at encouraging the tool that you're working with to correct what you don't think is appropriate or correct for the problem. So, whereas at one point you can, it's, it's no. It's no longer technically necessary to be this all-star of eight different frameworks and programming languages. The fact that you know to start a conversation with hi. This is what I'm trying to do, this is what I'm. This is the results I'm kind of looking for. I mean, it's it's.

1:39:08 - Alex Lindsay
it's amazing to think that the idea of politeness is now a technical skill and historically that has not always been the case well, and I think that the, the, uh, the other thing is is just that the I mean, I don't know whether ai is going to take over or not, but I will say that if you, if you latch on to some of these things like again when we look at lm, which I'm just kind of a little bit obsessed with, is that is, that you throw a book in there. I, I, I threw a book in and it built a podcast of it. This is like an I don't know 300, 400 page book. It built a podcast was better description than I could have made, like it was like the podcast was better than any way I could have, and it made up stuff that I was like, oh, that's really insightful of of that, of that book and and I, and I just never thought of it. I was like I never thought of it that way and um, uh, the um, and I think that then I became really obsessed with. I really want to throw every book in.

So I started trying to figure out, like how do I get all my Kindle books out of that format so that I can get it in? But I realized with Apple, eventually you're just going to go to look at all my book library and just let me interrogate my book library Like, group these books? That is super cool 20 books on the Civil War together. And then I'm going to ask you know what were the most important points of Grant's career, or where did he do this, or when was he sitting on? There was a point where Grant was on the side of a river and the Confederates were sneaking over. What battle was that?

1:40:28 - Leo Laporte
Never fight. Uphill me boys Never fight. Uphill me boys Never fight uphill.

1:40:32 - Andy Ihnatko
And not just that, but thinking about, like I use Reader a lot R-E-E-D-E-R to keep on track of all kinds of different news sources and blogs that I really, really like and to aggregate all those into a subset of things LM that can do, basically notebook LM or something like that, where I can be driving during an hour long commute or on the train or whatever, and it's just reading me, not necessarily giving me the same experience as like doing text to speech and reading these things. But basically, well, here are the you saved. Like you thought that 96 articles were interesting. Let's give you an overview of what it and then, if it's going, then if it's about to move on, actually no, stay more. Did that article about what's happening in Indonesia? Did it sound as though they're banning the use of iPhones in Indonesia, or just the? Well, actually there's, and I can stop. Okay, make a note about that. That's the sort of thing we can start to interrogate back. That's exactly what they demonstrated back at Google IO this year.

1:41:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so what Apple? I feel like that is the next phase of Apple intelligence and it's going to be interesting because that's not going to happen until next year. That's a 25-26 product cycle thing, because one of the little catches that shows you that Apple is behind is the stuff that Apple's building now is, for the most part, walled off, with Apple stuff right Like it's Apple building, apple's purpose-built stuff that ties into Apple intelligence. And if you talk to developers, app developers other than App Intents, which will allow Siri to control their apps and use features from those apps this spring sometime, there's nothing in there, like.

I know multiple app developers who are like so there's an LLM running on the iPhone now. Wouldn't it be nice if I, silvio Rizzi, the developer of Reader, or Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast, could use the LLM to do something, but right now they can't. The only way they could do it is they would have to train their own model, put it in their app and then, you know, run it on device, which they could do. But wouldn't it be better as an app developer if you could use Apple's model?

1:42:40 - Andy Ihnatko
What do you think that'll happen? I think it'll happen next year, yeah, but isn't it great that as part of the broader strategy? And again, this is why, if anybody needs to discuss if Apple is behind in AI, it depends on what you mean by behind. When they first outlined their multi-year plan, some of the most impressive stuff was and, by the way, we are going to have basically a framework so that an app-like reader could simply say hi, ai apps. I am capable of doing this. If you ask me in this way, I will give you these answers for that, and the ability to say and if you don't want to use our language models or our AI models, bring on your own. They will interface just nicely. So it doesn't feel as though Apple would have to either enter into a really intimate relationship with the developer to make that happen, nor would the developer have to do that much more than what is strictly required to make that app have that function. It's super exciting.

1:43:34 - Alex Lindsay
John MUELLER, again, apple has access to all of your personal data, in which they are purportedly keeping it secret and secure, and the issue there is that, as Apple builds that out and provides it back to their developers where this is where cutting off the developers makes sense, because I don't want everybody to be seeing all the things that I'm I'm pretty boring guy, but, but most of the time you know like, but you can imagine, like I don't want to dig some.

I don't want some random thing to be digging through all my email, uh, or digging through all these other things. And and I think that that is the advantage that Apple has over everybody else is, as they, as they build this out, they they control the hardware and the process and they have this three layered system and at first, that outer layer is going to be 90 and by five years from now it'll probably be 20, and 10 years from now it'll probably be five percent, you know, and everything just inside of that cloud you're watching mac break weekly Andy inako, Alex lindsey, Jason snell uh, so, Jason, uh, you have an article on Six Colors.

1:44:35 - Leo Laporte
Apple releases second wave of intelligence features. What's new in 18.2?

1:44:42 - Jason Snell
So the modifications to writing tools that I already mentioned, chat, gpt integration, which is a huge one, right Like you can-.

1:44:50 - Leo Laporte
So Fred Arrigi talks about this with Joanna Stern in her journal article. They send it out to chat GPT when the on-device model is insufficient.

1:44:59 - Jason Snell
Right, that's the idea, is the model actually checks and says can I answer this or not? And if it can't, then it will offer to take it out to GPT, although you can say don't ask me, just do it. And you can also say I pay for for chat gpt and here's my login and yeah, then it's integrated and then you use their terms instead of whatever apple has negotiated. Also, my understanding is you know there are limits, like if you're thinking, woohoo, free chat gpt, I can use it forever through siri and it won't matter and I won't get, I I believe you. There are limits. If you use it all the time, you will run up against the limits. As a free Apple user, there will be a limit to what you can do with it. But still, that's integrated in Siri, but also, like I said in writing, tools and some other places where you can do that. So it's a start.

It's clear that they want to add other models in. They want to add Google in there. They probably want to add other assistants in there, but this is the starting point for that. I would say one of the biggest things in there is image playground and the other image generating tools. These are things that we're seeing for the first time. Like I said, there's a waiting list and I haven't been able to get through, but the idea that you can generate things that are Pixar-like or they're hand-drawn like, but they're like images based on your prompt or based on again, rather than just having it be fill in a text in an empty box what a great interface. They're like giving you little tokens where you can. They suggest things that you can add in, and that's very helpful as well. And then Genmoji is a part of that which I'm actually more excited about, because that's the that looks like fun.

Yeah, because that's trained on the style of Apple's emoji only, and so it's a very limited data set where you're making more emoji in the style of apple's emoji set, which I think will end up being kind of a fun. Somebody sent me a picture of like a duck with sunglasses on, dressed up like one of the characters from miami vice, like you know, t-shirt and bright colored jacket and I was like and but it's an emoji. And I'm like I don't know what we call this emoji cool duck, but it was. It was great and it looked like an emoji. So so there's some of that in there.

And then they've got they've got this, this wand feature for when you're using the pencil, which is interesting. You're taking notes and the idea is you sketch something out and then you go to the wand tool and you circle it and it basically generates a better version of the dumb thing that you sketched. Of course, apple's examples for this are terrible, because Apple can't bear to show bad looking art in its example. So, like at WWDC, they did this, where somebody drew this beautiful temple, hand drawn, and then they circled it and it turned into like an AI generated version of a temple and I was sitting there thinking, well, don't do that, like that was a beautiful drawing, change my ugly drawing, because I'm bad at it. I'm really bad. So I'm looking forward to trying that feature out because that might be an example where I draw a stupid stick figure doing a thing and then I go, hey, make this look better and have it do that.

So the three different kinds of image generation in there are, I think, a big part of it. And then there's some more stuff. Visual intelligence, which they showed off with the iPhone 16, is there, although it's really just like a chat GPT or Google reverse image search or translation app right now. It needs to be way smarter about analyzing the photo and suggesting things you can do with it. But again, developer beta one that may be on the way. And good news for people who are not in the US in point two, you can use. It's still English, only so far, but if you're in Canada, uk, australia, new Zealand or South Africa English, you can be in your local English localization and use Apple Intelligence in that language, which is a step up.

1:48:43 - Andy Ihnatko
And then there are some more languages that are coming next year search, be able to ask Shlomo questions and pull answers out of your photos library, because I just got access to Ask Photos on Google Photos and it really is like a very, very powerful tool for all that little data that you accidentally and unintentionally collect through.

1:49:09 - Leo Laporte
Google also does that with screenshots, right, Andy? Yeah.

1:49:12 - Andy Ihnatko
So plain text search in photos. Google also does that with screenshots, right, andy?

1:49:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the idea of using screenshots almost as a database of things you've seen.

1:49:17 - Jason Snell
Plain text search in photos got good with this go-round where it's just you type anything in there and it does an amazing. After it's indexed your photo library, which it does locally. It does an amazing job of finding what you're looking for and Siri is tied in with it. I haven't tested that, but it should be better at that and again next year. It's also adding a whole bunch of those features where if you're looking at a photo, you should be able to say can you find other photos that are like this? And it knows what photo you're looking at. But that's not not yet. But because one of the reasons they made search so good in photos is because they knew that that would be a way that the assistant could go and make a quick photo query and get you what you wanted.

1:49:59 - Andy Ihnatko
And you played with it. It's such a. It's just. I'm just quick, just to give you a quick example. Like as soon as I had asked photos, I asked the question what time is the cheese shop closed today? And because there's a new cheese shop that opened two weeks ago, I took a picture not of the sign that says this is a cheese shop, but just a little hand-markered sign in the window of what the store hours are, and it correctly said oh, closes at 6 pm. That's the sort of stuff that your apple users are going to get access to.

1:50:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a transformative sort of thing people already use their, uh, their camera to kind of make notes. I take pictures of screenshots.

1:50:30 - Alex Lindsay
I do it all the time, but I don't, but then you have to kind of know where you're going. I think that there's going to be a point where I always take, when I'm at the airport, I always take a picture of the number you know J5 or whatever.

1:50:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Where did I park? I remember where it is Saying that to your watch and getting the answer.

1:50:44 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, just imagine it. Just telling you Now, nowadays, your watch or your phone will tell you where you parked. I've been learning that it's less important to do that, but still being able to take pictures of stuff somewhere in the world and have it just contextually remember.

1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
That is going to be really exciting. Yeah, this is really what ai is. How ai is going to change the world is in these little details, yeah, that are going to subtly be incrementally added to your life. So I think apple's is probably pretty smart. They don't feel any rush to do this. Google released everything all at once. Apple says now we're going to dribble it out to you.

1:51:20 - Alex Lindsay
We want to get it right and it really is that.

1:51:22 - Leo Laporte
It's like the atm machine, you know it became part of our lives now, we wouldn't dream of walking into a bank we don't even go to the atm anymore. You know like that's true, that's a good point. Who needs cash?

1:51:33 - Alex Lindsay
Right, it was like moving, you know. But even just the little things like the photo cleanup is so well done in photos, like you just open stuff up and you're like you just start selecting things. I just want to get rid of all these things. Oh, that's cool and it's kind of magical. You hated the new photos. Have you come around? I hate the new photos on my iPhoto, but on my Mac I'm fine with it. It works the way I expect it to, so I still don't use it. I just kind of stopped using photos on my phone. I take camera pictures and then I wait until I'm sitting in front of my computer. But it syncs to your Mac, which is nice, yeah so I use it on my Mac.

My workflow has adjusted to my dislike for photos.

1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
So your dislike is only on ios, it's not it's the ios, it's the phone app.

1:52:18 - Alex Lindsay
That just drives me absolutely crazy. I still feel like I can't, like it's selecting things I don't want to select and it's finding things I don't want to find and I'm like I don't want to do any of these things, like I just want it. Like I just I, I just want to find the photo that I want to show someone while I'm standing there, and it never does that.

1:52:32 - Jason Snell
One of these days I want to see what you're doing when we're together in person, because I don't understand why it is like that for you.

1:52:39 - Alex Lindsay
It doesn't make any sense to me, and so I'm just like okay, and again, I just noticed it as I was doing the beta, Because you got to get, I guess I used to open up photos just for fun, like hey, what is it going to suggest to me that I should? You know, I can send photos to my, to my kids or my wife or whatever fun photos. So photos was like this fun thing and it just ceased to be that way and so, and it and it's just uh, and and it was. It was kind of sliding for me as well. But anyway, point is, the photos on the Mac is great, like it's, it's super powerful and um, and I'm like the distraction removal is I? I just just, I was playing with it since I got you know, and uh, um, I hadn't played with it until it got released today and I started opening it up and just starting to like get rid of this, get rid of this and it and it highlights everything.

So you just kind of tap on it like no, no, or if it doesn't highlight it, you circle it and it just disappears and and it's not perfect. There was a couple things I couldn't figure out, based on depth or whatever, but but for the most part it just nails it. Um, I think people are going to use that. This is, this is what apple's really good at. Here's a simple thing that everyone's going to use all the time, like they're just going to clean up their photos all the time without having to think about it and it's just built into their computer. They don't, you know.

1:53:50 - Andy Ihnatko
They just don't think about you know, cleaning that up will be second nature adobe added that to photoshop and lightroom and it's just literally just anything you think is a distraction. Get rid of it.

1:53:59 - Alex Lindsay
And I've been taking them into photoshop and yeah, like I've been doing in photo, like photoshop is incredible, like it's not. It's doing something way past what photos are doing, which is that I like I get a lot of photos of guests for our shows and they're, you know know, little weird square, square, whatever. I just move them to where I want on a 16 by nine image and just say make up the rest of the image, and it just goes blah, you know, and it just and, and there's two of them that don't make any sense, but the first one or the second one usually works.

1:54:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the number, the number of times I mean I won't get into an hour about how much I love these features, but the number of times where I've had to throw out an image because, damn, I, just I can't crop it, it's at the wrong angle and unfortunately there's like part of this person's hockey stick that's been cut off, and the ability to simply, well, you can straighten out that angle and we'll fill in most part of the background. If you want to go even so far as to say, please regenerate part of the stick that's outside of the frame, do that too.

1:54:52 - Alex Lindsay
Well, regenerate part of the stick that's outside of the frame do that too, and it's like god, I would just like, hey, put a countdown clock here. But there's all this text here. I just like select it in photoshop and just go get rid of that, and then I just put the put, put it where I need to go, and and it's. You know this again. These are the little things that I think apple's going to do well that really make more of a difference for everyday life than a lot of the bigger things that we're.

1:55:12 - Leo Laporte
You know that we're thinking a couple of quick stories before we get to our picks of the week, because it's about to be that time. To wrap things up, uh, apple has won its uh lawsuit against massimo over massimo's health watch the one they don't sell anymore and the jury awarded him a whopping 250 dollars uh, I don't think that the, I don't think that they.

1:55:34 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, this is not the blood oxygen thing.

1:55:36 - Leo Laporte
This has nothing to do with that this is kind of, I think, Apple's revenge.

1:55:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, they sued for this wearable, trying to say oh well, Massimo infringed on so many of our patents, hoping that they could then use that to roll it into a way of getting that back again. So they lost nearly every claim. I think they won on two of them. The reason why the uh, the award was so low was because apple just sued for 250 dollars.

1:56:02 - Leo Laporte
They, they didn't want them, they just yes they what they wanted, they well, not only that, but they wanted a jury trial.

1:56:08 - Andy Ihnatko
They did not want just the judge to evaluate this and pronounce it rolling, and that's like the minimum you can ask for in a jury trial. So it just so nothing. It was a waste of time. Yeah, a little 250 bucks, you buy, like what? Two dozen burritos for that.

1:56:21 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's not a small number of burritos, uh we also, uh have learned that apple is testing a blood sugar app, which is interesting. It's uh certainly something they would like to be able to measure blood sugar in a watch. That's a lot harder, it's a lot harder.

1:56:40 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that people who make sugary foods and ultra processed foods if they think that Atkins was a problem, everybody having a glucose monitor is the end. It is like as soon as they see what the impact of their food and it's that easy and they're not paying, you know, $400 and then $200 a month to do it If it's just on their watch. This is a. It's a extremely disruptive technology. To put into a watch and sell millions of it will change buying dramatically, and so it's just. It's really. That's why they're working on it is because it's going to make. When they say it's going to make a big difference in health, they mean it.

1:57:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, even for people who are not at risk of diabetes. The idea of wow, why, why do I wow? Why do I feel like crap today? And then they just happen to look at their watch and oh, I got two notifications saying that my blood sugar spiked. Like okay, maybe that was. And that happened exactly when I was. I decided to eat an entire cheesecake.

1:57:37 - Alex Lindsay
Wow, that was probably the reason why I felt like crap for the rest of the day, yeah, and having it on your wrist all the time and then it being able to send you alerts and it being able to say, hey, you just ate something, what did you eat? And it will eventually know what you ate.

1:57:58 - Leo Laporte
Like those. Know what you like? Those are the things and it starts to build this thing and everyone's going to realize that processed foods are worse than smoking. If you've always wanted to watch kevin costner uh, die of dysentery, maybe you'll get your. Maybe you'll get your wish oregon trail, the action comedy movie now in development at apple uh, kevin costner is not attached to the project, but that we can always hope right.

1:58:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, again, he's a man with a vision. Just don't let him direct or write, or if he's one of the first people who dies, you know? So he can just simply say that out of service table right he has to have a great track record for Westerns of the past.

1:58:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's, let's put it that way yeah, and yellowstone fans is still a little uh, the hollywood exclusive hollywood reporter has an exclusive.

1:58:38 - Andy Ihnatko
The sources uh tell them that the movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein you've got dysentery oregon trail.

1:58:48 - Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, you've always wanted it. Now you've got an action movie with music coming to Apple TV sometime, probably next year, I would guess. Uh, and finally the, the Starbucks. I know you all remember when the Steve Jobs called the internet device section.

1:59:03 - Alex Lindsay
Here I want to show you something truly.

1:59:05 - Jason Snell
Starbucks, which is Google Maps in the iPhone announcement, and ordered what did he order? He?

1:59:12 - Leo Laporte
ordered coffee for all of us in the audience yeah, those that Starbucks, uh, which was right there in the um in the Arbor Buena Center uh, is closed, is closing. That's it, it's gone. It's not a great neighborhood.

1:59:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I gotta say that finally got the last of those days out too that Starbucks used to be right across from my office.

1:59:34 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, that's right. Yeah, there was something horrible going on there almost once, at least once a week yes someone crazy coming in yelling people across, that people get into fights it was. I was surprised it lasted as long as it did. I mean I went there every day. So I mean you got to see I went there probably a couple times a day, probably more than I should have.

1:59:53 - Leo Laporte
I like it that the San Francisco Chronicle could not find a photo of it without garbage cans in front. But there you have it. These things happen. The 4th Street Starbucks gone, but not forgotten. Actually it's still there if you want to visit it, till November 8th just take a buddy just don't go alone.

Bring your walking cane, um knife. Um, all right, let's take a little break. And then your picks of the week. My friends, you're watching mac break weekly. Uh, the club members, we love it. Thank you for being here. Uh, we couldn't do it without you. Um 12000 strong.

Now I haven't noticed that the club has kind of plateaued a little bit, so I'm gonna have to start ringing the club bell every time we have a new member or something like that. We would really love to get you all. All you know, many tens of thousands of people watch this show, but only about two percent have actually joined the club. We'd love to get you all in the club. It makes a big difference to our bottom line. Uh, seven bucks a month, that's all we ask. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get additional content. Last week we did Stacey's book club. This week we're going to do Chris Marquardt's photo review and photo news. You photographers will love that. Uh, we're looking at all sorts of other things to do. In fact, one of our club members has been lobbying hard for me to do a little on-screen emaxing, do a little coding, getting ready for the advent of code, which is just about a month off. Maybe we'll do that too, but it's gonna take your seven dollars.

Okay, just join the club at twit.tv/clubtwit, you can get it for free. I this is something new. We have a referral program, so if you tell a friend and they join the club, you get a free month. Tell 12 friends, you get a free year. Tell 144 friends, you probably will never have to pay for club twit again. Who doesn't have 144 friends that can get to join the club? I ask you twit.tv/clubtwit for all the details and I thank all of our club members in all seriousness, because you've actually kept the lights on here. None of this goes into my pocket. In fact, Lisa and I probably aren't going to get paid for the rest of the year, but that's okay because John Ashley will, our hosts will, and the electric bill will be paid and all of that, and that's important.

twit.tv/clubtwit. I don't want to tell you what doesn't, what won't happen or what will happen if you don't join. That's too grim to talk about Club Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit. Uh, I am not buyinga Mac Mini because, uh, not enough of you to join the club, so I am. I am tightening my belt as well, this hat I bought a long time ago. Uh, this shirt is new, I admit it, but it came out of my retirement savings. Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week, sir.

2:02:56 - Alex Lindsay
So I have a pool, as you've heard before, and knowing what temperature it is, it's important if I decide I want to jump in. And I found that you get a lot of things floating around. You have to go down and look at it. And I got this Inkbird pool thermometer. It floats around in the pool and I can literally walk near the pool, like out in my office here, and open up my phone and it just gives me the entire history. So it's sampling every minute and so it's not just that, it's telling me what the temperature is right now. It gives I get to see what all the trends are. So I know I happen to know that my pool is as warm as it's going to get between 445 and 530 every day right now, and when the sun changes it'll change. But being able to see all that data is really really useful as far. And it just your phone. It works on Android or iPhone. It's going to connect over Bluetooth, so you do have to be within 20, 30 feet of it, but for me it works pretty much almost the entire pool if I just walk out of my office and I can kind of see what it looks like.

But it it again, it's not just like, oh, what is the temperature right now? It's what has the temperature been? When is it at the coldest? It's going to be. When it's the hottest it's going to be, um, you know, and you kind of can build your, your swimming patterns around it. So, uh, so swimming has become more of my fitness regime for me, paying attention to when it's warmest or coldest.

If you want to do a cold, you know a cold dip, you know. Like, where you sit in the cold, cold water, I know Cold dip, the cold plunge, the cold plunge, you know. Then you know, I happen to know that if I really want it to be as cold as that pole is going to go 10 am, 9 am Time to to know that if I really want it to be as cold as that pole's going to go, 10 am is a good time to sit down. I'm sitting there and it's going to be, as this is as good as I'm trying to train myself. I asked my brother my brother has one of those little cold plunge things and I was like, what temperature do you like? And he's like, oh, 40 degrees 40.

2:04:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, that's really cold, I know, yeah. Do you have a sauna that you can warm up before you jump in?

2:04:54 - Alex Lindsay
I do yeah, so there you go, yeah, so, but you get really hot.

2:04:59 - Leo Laporte
And then when you jump in 40 degrees, isn't that cold? Yeah, exactly For a minute. Yeah, exactly For 10 seconds.

2:05:08 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah exactly.

2:05:08 - Leo Laporte
That's good that, by the way, that ink bird is not expensive Less than 30 bucks. Yeah, it's 30 bucks. You know, it's the pool that really can set you back every week every week, every week, uh, chemicals you know, we used to have a hot tub and I gave it up.

It's just too much work to maintain. It's just, it's insane. Yeah, it's so nice and I always wanted a pool, but no, uh. Yeah, it's so nice and I always wanted a pool, but no, uh, Andy and nako with a little bit of a timely recommendation for us.

2:05:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, got some sad news during the show. Uh, terry garr has passed away.

Uh, fantastic actress on television movies you might remember from we should all watch young frankenstein just to celebrate terry's life and times but she was one of those actresses that was just always working and, uh, mr mom, and, oh god, I think we're two of her funniest movies, um, so it's a show. Uh, it's pretty sad. Another, but one of the places where she really shined out was that she was one of david letterman's best guests, because they really had like a brother-sister rivalry let's see how much we can annoy each other thing going on, which is why they kept bringing her on again and again and again. So I'm going to recommend, in addition to seeing any of those really great movies, go to Don Giller's Terry Garr collection gar collection on uh letterman. Excuse me, don giller's terry gar collection on letterman. It's available on youtube. He is uh the letterman shows, first long time unofficial and then official archivist.

He literally has every single episode in his possession because he was just recording them all the time and he has indexed and archived all of them so well before this happened he created. It's not creepy at all, no, no, so well before this happened, he created a five-part collection.

2:06:55 - Alex Lindsay
It's not creepy at all.

2:06:57 - Andy Ihnatko
No, it's great, Any topic you can think about. There was somebody on Reddit, one of those. Help me find subreddits. I know this is impossible, but my great aunt was on this episode in the audience and I'm trying to find it, and I know this is impossible. For this one episode I said here is the person on YouTube Talk to Don. Here is his address, and of course he had it and he was nice enough to produce like a rip of it and provide to them that same day.

2:07:25 - Jason Snell
So he has, like a file maker, I think, a file maker database of all of the everything that's in the. Letterman show and, just to be fair, here the letterman people would call him for stuff, and now I believe he is, at least partially, employed by, uh, worldwide pants because they now they have their own youtube channel and I think that some, for to some degree he is involved in there so was he recording these on vhs tape?

2:07:49 - Leo Laporte
I mean?

2:07:51 - Andy Ihnatko
he started off in like from the very, very beginning, for every technology was available, like starting in the early 80s and when there was stuff that he, I imagine, when there's stuff he couldn't get, he got it and it took him a while to convert it all to dvd, then took him a while to convert it all to digital and again produce that master index. Uh, this is every. This is why, like on the letterman channel on youtube, every time there's like a news item, there's probably going to be a compilation of clips related to that news item posted that same day or the next day, because, as Jason said, he has this master database of everything that happened on every single show ever. Uh, and so if you want to watch, not just let it out.

2:08:28 - Leo Laporte
By the way, lots of other uh shows. Yeah, although, since he got, hired by Letterman's.

2:08:34 - Jason Snell
YouTube channel he can't post new things on his channel because those are for the Letterman channel, but he's got. It's everything. It's amazing, including what is it, andy?

2:08:45 - Alex Lindsay
A five part series of Terry Garr's greatest hits on Letterman that's just spectacular, you can just watch the whole thing and this is literally.

2:08:54 - Jason Snell
I don't know about you, andy. My favorite is that they had her take a shower. Yes, this is yeah, I'm sorry.

2:09:01 - Andy Ihnatko
They had a show in which the conceit was it's too hot to do a show, so they sent the audience home and they just did the entire show from Letterman's office and all the guests just like sat on the sofa and they had a chat like in their normal clothes. And again this, this, this goading each other relationship, like you know, take a shower like, jump in the shower like, and of course they blocked everything off with towels. And the last shot of this episode is terry guard, you assume, behind this door, like really showering.

2:09:25 - Leo Laporte
I hate you yep you know, and that's the and, so that's, that's part two, that's actually the ones I linked in the show notes.

2:09:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so good.

2:09:34 - Jason Snell
Just a great sense of humor. She was on original Star Trek too, was she? Yeah, in one episode of Simon and Earth it was with Robert Lansing. It was actually a backdoor pilot, gene Roddenberry. Gene Roddenberry, you know, success of Star Trek wasn't enough for him. He always wanted the next thing, and so he kept on doing these, like maybe this could be a show with Terry Gard, robert Lansing, where they travel through time and solve crimes. And it wasn't. But there's one episode of Star Trek, the one with the cat, where they're trying to stop the NASA rocket launch. Anyway, she's a child of the 60s who has some nice things about, like why people are for network TV. In 1968, you know, having her explain why the young people were feeling rebellious was kind of it's kind of interesting, kind of yeah, she was great yeah, great, great, great.

2:10:18 - Leo Laporte
She will be missed. 79, terry gar yeah, sucks ms. Yeah, very sad um, but boy, she was wonderful really was, and I think I, it sounds like you like some of her other movies, but uh, I have to say young frankenstein, everybody should just watch that for sure I. I knew that everyone's gonna be talking about young frankenstein, but sounds like you like some of her other movies, but uh, I have to say, young Frankenstein, everybody should just watch that for sure.

2:10:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I knew that everyone's gonna be talking about young Frankenstein, but everything she was in she was in an episode of New Heart, uh Bob of the Bob Newhart show.

2:10:43 - Jason Snell
She was Phoebe's mother on friends for like four episodes right, I love her on Tootsie great comedy yeah, with Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray yeah oh, that's right.

2:10:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, she was tootsie's close encounter in the show.

2:10:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, oh, terry richard riefus's wife in close encounters too.

2:10:58 - Leo Laporte
You can show this.

2:11:00 - Jason Snell
It's clean, very clean lots of stuff yeah yeah come on, terry, go in this, go in the shower. So horrible, you couldn't do that today.

2:11:09 - Leo Laporte
Don't mean david, you're so mean david just're, so mean yeah that's so good oh so good. Thank you, uh, everybody, for joining us for this edition of mac break weekly. Jason, Jason, sorry, oh, I'll give you, my pick is real. Oh, Jason, you got to do a pick before we go.

2:11:27 - Jason Snell
It's a Halloween pick, it's a Halloween theme pick. Um, for my podcast, the incomparable, we try to do something. Uh, that is a Halloween movie and I had my friend, steve Lutz, selected a movie for me that I had never seen and I don't know how I missed it, probably because I thought it was something else. I don't love really gross, cynical horror movies. It seems like you should watch 1985's Fright Night, directed by a guy named Tom Holland, who is neither the Spider-Man actor who was not alive then nor the history podcaster, but a third horror movie director, tom Holland. It's amazing. I highly recommend it to anybody who was like no, no, no, I don't want to watch.

It is not a slasher movie, it is a love letter to kind of classic horror and fans of classic horror. The elevator pitch is brilliant. It is literally a kid who likes watching like the late night horror host on the local TV channel discovers that a vampire has moved in next door and nobody believes him. So he has to go to the horror host played by Roddy McDowell, who is very much like yeah, sure, kid vampires, because he doesn't believe it either, but I assure you it is a vampire. He's played by Chris Sarandon right before he was humperdink and the princess bride. He has never looked more like a pure beautiful vampire man, and it is. Here's my rating on the 80s scale.

2:12:46 - Alex Lindsay
It is an 80 out of 80 for being an 80s movie, it is the most 80s movie you will find.

2:12:53 - Jason Snell
And if you love 80s, retro stuff, uh, and horror movies, especially classic stuff, I just it's Halloween week, fright night, it's on max in the us. Uh, 1985 there was a remake, but check out the original.

2:13:06 - Leo Laporte
It is uh fabulous, I loved it, so listen to the podcast while you're watching no, it's not a commentary.

2:13:13 - Jason Snell
You should watch the movie and then you can listen to the uncomfortable after if're watching.

2:13:15 - Leo Laporte
No, it's not a commentary. You should watch the movie and then you can listen to the incomparable after, if you want, and we've talked about how great, it is no

2:13:17 - Jason Snell
spoilers, though Great great fun.

2:13:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I ask you one question on the 80s stuff? Does it have an end title song? That is like 90% synthesizers.

2:13:28 - Jason Snell
It does, and in fact it is performed by the Jay Giles Band and it is called Fright Night Wow a little trivia there 80 out of 80 on the English scale Could not be more 80.

2:13:40 - Leo Laporte
We'll watch it tonight. We watched Rosemary's Baby last night. We'll watch Fright Night.

2:13:44 - Jason Snell
This is a little lighter than that. It is just more fun. That's pretty heavy. It's just silly and fun it's great Love it.

2:13:48 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jason Snell. Now go to sixcolors.com. That's his work, his day job. The charts will be coming out thursday.

2:13:55 - Jason Snell
We'll talk about them on next tuesday, but you can put a bat in there or something I don't know put a bat, a bat in the pumpkin.

2:14:02 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you can find Jason's podcasts at sixcolors.com.

2:14:07 - Jason Snell
Slash Jason oh, you got, you got a little russian there for them.

2:14:10 - Leo Laporte
But I guess, if you say, six colors.

2:14:12 - Jason Snell
As a vampire, you're very close six.

2:14:22 - Leo Laporte
I love six colors. I have a different. My vampire is, uh, grooving a little bit across the carpathians. Yeah, uh, thank you so much. Jason snell, Andy and ako gbh we talked about it earlier. Look forward to hearing you there and whatever secret projects you might be working on for future reference, shall we say it's great to have you, andrew. And, of course, Alex Lindsay, officehours.global and graymattershow what's going on on the Office Hours?

2:14:47 - Alex Lindsay
We had one of the folks from Opus come on Opus Clip yesterday and it's kind of mind-blowing Like a lot of things. I think the thing that, uh, yesterday and it's kind of mind-blowing like a lot of things, I didn't. I think the thing that it progresses. I usually just kind of throw things into it and see what comes out the other end and they, they walked through a lot of those details and so, um, anyway, it was really fascinating, so definitely worth checking out and a q, a episode today, which is we're doing a lot more q a's.

So we're uh, we'll be doing a lot more Q&As through the rest of the year because we're moving the show to 4K HDR 5.1. We've been experimenting with it and hinting with it, and so there's a big technological jump that we have to do over the next two months, and we didn't want to have a lot of external guests. So you'll see a lot of Q&As as we go forward, because we're doing a ton of work on the back end to get everything up to what we think is, you know, the next level of quality. For us, first step is to get it to that really high quality, and the next step will be to put it into the cloud, and so we're doing kind of both of those at the same time.

2:15:47 - Leo Laporte
And the Office Hours t-shirt is now available.

2:15:50 - Alex Lindsay
You can get it. It's a the Office Hours t-shirt is out. It's a fundraiser for us. So, to keep the lights on, we're selling some t-shirts. But it took us a long time. It took us four years. I like that logo. That's great. Yeah, it took us again four years to get to a point where we're ready to do a shirt, but I don't know when we'll do one another one, but we're going to sell these until November 20th and and, uh, about 20 of it goes to uh, paying for the AWS and zoom bills mostly.

So they add up, don't they, do they?

2:16:26 - Leo Laporte
sure do add up. So, yeah, they do. Thank you, uh, Ale, and thank you, Andy, and thank you, Jason, and thanks to all of our Club Twit members and everybody who watched during the show today. We had oh, I don't see a number, so I don't know how many thousands of people watching live, but we do love that. I do encourage you, though, if you watch live, to download a copy of the episode as a souvenir of your visit. You can get the live show. It's 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, as I said, next week, 1900 UTC. You can watch on all eight of those platforms. Club Twit members, in the Discord there's YouTube and Twitch and x.com and Facebook and LinkedIn and Kick. Watch wherever you want, but download a copy to twit.tv/mbw. There's audio and video there. When you go to twit.tv/mbw, you will see a link to a dedicated YouTube channel that's just MacBreak Weekly all MacBreak Weekly, all the time.

A great way to share little clips of the show if you want to pass along some wisdom, some knowledge, or is there something that you thought was pretty funny? Speaking of funny, we are putting together our best of shows and we would love, while you're at the website, to get your picks for the best moments in 2024 for MacBreak Weekly. Can you believe we're coming to the end of 2024? Wow, go to twit.tv/bestof and give us whatever information you have, even if it's just a rough sketch it was sometime back in April or whatever. The more you give us, the better it'll be.

John Ashley, we'll thank you for that. You can also, after the fact, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That's really the best way to get it. Choose audio or video, and that way you'll have MacBreak Weekly automatically the minute we have edited it down and put it into a nice package. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time. And, as I have said now for 945 episodes, almost 20 years it's time to get back to work because break time is over. See you next time.